About the Authors Dirk Krafzig

Dirk has been dealing with the challenges of enterprise IT and distributed software architectures throughout his entire working life. He devoted himself to SOA in 2001 when he joined Shinka Technologies, a start-up company and platform vendor in the early days of XML-based Web services. Since then, Dirk has acquired a rich set of real world experience with this upcoming new paradigm both from the view point of a platform vendor and from the perspective of software projects in different industry verticals.

Writing this book was an issue of personal concern to him as it provided the opportunity to share his experiences and many insights into the nature of enterprise IT with his readers.

Today, Dirk is designing enterprise applications and managing projects, applying the guiding principles outlined in this book. Dirk has a Ph.D. in Natural Science and an MSc in Computer Science. He lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is 39 years old, married, and the father of two children.

Software architecture has been with Karl since he programmed his first TRON-like game on the then state-of-the art ZX81 in the early 1980s. After graduating as a Master of Physics, he gained his commercial experience in various consulting assignments, mostly in the financial and telecommunications sector.

He moved through stages of consultant, technical lead, software architect, and project manager using a variety of object-oriented technologies, programming languages, and distributed computing environments. Soon realizing that he was too constrained as an employee in doing what he thought necessary in software development, he co-founded the company iternum in 2000, where he currently acts as a principal consultant and general manager.

Karl permanently lives in Mainz, Germany when not temporarily relocated by a current project.

Having spent the last ten years at the forefront of distributed computing technology, Dirk has developed an in-depth understanding of enterprise software architectures and their application in a variety of industry verticals. Dirk was a senior consultant with IONA Technologies, working with Fortune 500 customers in Europe, America, and Asia on large-scale software integration projects. After this, Dirk set up his own company, Shinka Technologies, which successfully developed one of the first XML-based Web services middleware products, starting as early as 1999.

Dirk holds an MSc in computer sciences from TU-Berlin and an MBA from IMD in Lausanne. He is a co-author of Enterprise CORBA (Prentice Hall, 1999), the leading book on CORBA-based system architectures. Dirk is currently working as a solution architect for Computer Sciences Corporation in Zurich, Switzerland.

Contact: authors@enterprise-soa.com