Thomas Erl is a top-selling IT author, founder of Arcitura Education, and series editor of the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl . With more than 175,000 copies in print worldwide, his books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major IT organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Accenture, IEEE, HL7, MITRE, SAP, CISCO, HP, and many others. As CEO of Arcitura Education Inc., Thomas has led the development of curricula for the internationally recognized Big Data Science Certified Professional (BDSCP), Cloud Certified Professional (CCP) and SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) accreditation programs, which have established a series of formal, vendor-neutral industry certifications obtained by thousands of IT professionals around the world. Thomas has toured more than 20 countries as a speaker and instructor. More than 100 articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine . Clive Gee has over 30 years'' experience in the IT industry and has worked for IBM in both the UK and the United States, spending the majority of his career as a solution architect dedicated to the early customer implementations of emerging technologies such as object-orientation, mobile computing, and SOA. Clive has taken on the role of consulting architect on many customer engagements in the aerospace, manufacturing, and public sectors, as well as projects in the retail, transportation, telecommunications, insurance, and financial industries.

He has a strong business focus and a track record of developing innovative and yet practical solutions to fulfill real business needs.Over the last few years, Clive has turned his attention to SOA governance, a field in which he is considered to be a leading worldwide practitioner. He has led efforts with several major organizations in the United States, Japan, and Australia that were successful at establishing SOA Centers of Excellence and implementing effective governance in areas of service-orientation.Clive is currently residing in Scotland''s Northern Isles as a semi-retiree who still agrees to take part in the occasional project. He is a co-author of the book titled SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business Agility (IBM Press 2008), as well as another book from the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl titled SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud .An expert in middleware, Jurgen Kress currently works at Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels and is responsible for Oracle''s EMEA fusion middleware partner business. He is the founder of the Oracle SOA & BPM, WebLogic Partner Communities, and the global Oracle Partner Advisory Councils. The Fusion Middleware Partner Community is home to over 5,000 members internationally as Oracle''s most active and successful community, which Jurgen manages with monthly newsletters, Webcasts, and conferences.

He also hosts the annual Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forums and Fusion Middleware Summer Camps, where more than 200 partners receive product updates, roadmap insights, and hands-on training supplemented by a variety of Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, discussion forums, online communities, blogs, and wikis. Jurgen is also a member of the steering board of the International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium, and is a frequent speaker at conferences that include the SOA & BPM Integration Days, JAX, UKOUG, OUGN, and OOP. Berthold Maier enjoys working for a wide portfolio of clients as a chief architect and enterprise architect, and possesses over 18 years of experience as a developer, coach, and architect in the building of complex mission-critical applications and in integration scenarios. Throughout his 11-year career at Oracle, Berthold has been given leading positions within the consulting division that notably included chief architect, a management position in which he assumed responsibility for reference architectures involving SOA and enterprise integration. Berthold is also the originator and architect of several frameworks around EAM and SOA, and is well-known as a conference speaker, book author, and magazine writer. Hajo Normann works for Accenture in the role of SOA & BPM Community of Practice lead in ASG and is responsible for the architecture and solution design of SOA/BPM projects, primarily acting as the interface between business and IT. He enjoys tackling organizational and technical challenges and motivating solutions in customer workshops, conferences, and publications.

Together with Torsten Winterberg, Hajo leads the DOAG SIG Middleware and is an Oracle ACE director and active member of a global network within Accenture who is in regular contact with SOA/BPM architects from around the world. Pethuru Raj possesses over 12 years of professional experience in the IT industry. In his academic career, he was granted international fellowships, JSPS and JST, to work as a postdoctoral researcher at two leading Japanese universities for three years. After earning a UGC-sponsored PhD degree from Anna University in Chennai, India, Pethuru obtained a CSIR fellowship to work as a research associate in the department of Computer Science and Automation at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Pethuru has worked as an application architect for eight years and a product architect for four years, leveraging the opportunities that came his way to become specialized in the business domains of telecommunications, retail, government, energy, and healthcare.Prior to his career at Wipro Consulting, Pethuru spent one year as the enterprise architect at Sify Software Ltd. and over a year and a half as a lead architect in Bosch''s corporate research division. During his three years as a senior architect for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Practice of Wipro Technologies, Pethuru become well-versed in emerging technologies like cloud computing, SOA, event-driven architecture, and enterprise architecture.

He has also developed a keen understanding of Big Data computing (Hadoop), realtime cloud analytics, and machine-to-machine (M2M) integration, as well as high-performance system design and various smartphone applications. Pethuru has authored chapters for a number of technology-centric books in collaboration with internationally acclaimed professors, and is author of a book titled Cloud Enterprise Architecture that is published by CRC Press. Leo Shuster has directed efforts in enterprise architecture and SOA strategy and execution for a number of organizations, including the National City Corporation, Ohio Savings Bank, and Progressive Insurance. He currently holds the position of director, IT Architecture at Nationwide Insurance, and possesses almost 20 years of IT experience. Throughout his career, Leo has performed in a variety of roles that span all aspects of the software development lifecycle and IT management. As a result, Leo has gained expertise in enterprise and application architecture, SOA, and IT governance and transformation, as well as platform modernization, process management and reengineering, and strategic planning, among many other areas. He frequently shares this knowledge with the IT community through articles and blog posts. Leo holds an MS in computer science and engineering from the Case Western Reserve University, and an MBA from the Cleveland State University.

Leo has presented on enterprise architecture, SOA, BPM, and related topics for groups of all sizes at various industry events and conferences. He is a co-author of the book titled SOA Governance: Governing Shared Services On-Premise and in the Cloud , which is a part of the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl . Leo regularly discusses advanced software architecture topics on his blog, which can be viewed at http://leoshuster.blogspot.com.Since the launch of his career in the mid-90s, Bernd Trops has worked as a system engineer, SOA architect, and coach on countless OO and SOA projects for a range of companies that include GemStone, Brokat, WebGain, and Oracle. During his time at Oracle, Bernd held the position of SOA architect and was primarily involved in large-scale initiatives. One notable project under his belt is the Deutsche Post Service-Backbone, which comprises the foundation of the Talend ESB.

In his current role of principal solution architect at Talend, Bernd is closely involved in technical architecture and the design of complex IT solutions.Bernd has presented at a number of industry conferences during his career, such as the SOA Symposium, Oracle Open World, JAX, and OOP. Bernd is co-author of SOA Design Patterns and SOA Speizial , as well as cofounder of the Mason of SOA. Clemens Utschig-Utschig is currently heading Marketing & Sales Architecture at Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world''s leading pharmaceutical companies, at its corporate headquarters in Germany, focusing on implementing the digital revolution and consolidating the global landscape onto standard platforms. Before joining Marketing and Sales he ran the global master data management program inside BI''s Shared Service Center--devel- oping the global process templates for customer, vendor and material maintainance, deploying those into BI''s network and providing global transactional services from Brazil to China. Prior to joining Boehringer Ingelheim, Clemens fostered a ten-year career at Oracle as a platform architect on the SOA/BPM development team, helping clients establish enterprise-wide SOA. He also drove the development of several platform components, such as the Weblogic SCA container and the Spring Service Engine. Philip Wik is currently a DBA for Redflex Traffic Systems.

With more than 30 years of experience, Philip.