About the authors

Andrew Bell works at Capgemini where he is a Senior Applications Consultant for the Oracle Practice. He has more than 30 years' experience in the IT industry covering a wide range of software products and industry verticals. He worked with Oracle products and toolsets for more than 25 years including 12 years working with Oracle SOA suite and Oracle BPM. He first started working in the SOA space 14 years ago, and has successfully delivered many challenging and complex Oracle Middleware projects for large blue-chip clients. In recent years, he has become involved with numerous SaaS-to-SaaS integration projects as well as API development and microservice architectures.

Andrew is well respected for his depth of knowledge in the areas of SOA, API design, and BPM. He has strong team lead and communication skills and a deep all round technical knowledge, which covers both the Oracle stack and Java. 

I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Alison, for her patience and support while I spent many hours locked away working on this book, and my children James, Christopher, George, and Ella. I would also like to thank my good friend, Luis, for giving me the opportunity to write this book with him and the other authors. Thank you so much, Luis, Phil, and Sander, for your time and knowledge sharing; it was great working alongside you all. Very much appreciated.

Sander Rensen has been involved in the integration space with over 12 years of experience in the IT industry. Sander started his career as a developer in migrating large sets of data, but his organizational and leadership skills were soon taken noticed, which he applied successfully across a variety of data migration projects. Sander soon turned his attention to focus on traditional SOA architecture to develop, design, test, and lead SOA implementations to a successful outcome for his clients. In Capgemini, Sander executes two roles. He is leading the Oracle UK PaaS Team and is a PaaS Architect with his current focus on API Management and adapting microservice architecture.

Outside his project responsibilities Sander has an eye for young talent, and as part of the Capgemini Apprentice and Graduate Program helps to find the right talent, and once hired, advise them in their careers and include them in some of the initiatives that he is running. Sander is also an alumni of one of the Capgemini pretentious Future Leaders Programs.

Sander is a passionate advocate of integration technologies and shares his knowledge and insights on social media, presented at the Oracle User Group Conference (UKOUG), and helps his local charity with a cost-effective website.

Outside his work, after his family, Sander is keen in sports that involves anything with a ball at present, mainly tennis and golf.

This book has been a great project. I am honored to be asked to help writing this book by innovators like Luis Weir and Phil Wilkins, and I am also honored by the learning from Andy Bell and the years of experience he has brought to the table. Thank you.

This book would not have been possible for me without the support of my family in The Netherlands and the UK. First of all, my mum and dad in The Netherlands who have always given me the freedom to explore and find my ways to take on new adventures. Lastly, my wife, Siobhan and our kids, who are my true inspiration to continue to drive for perfection. My wife has taken up a lot of extra responsibility to look after the kids while I was stuck in the attic or a dark corner in the kitchen writing the book.

Luis Weir is an Oracle Ace Director and a Thought Leader in PaaS technologies and SOA. With more than 15 years of experience implementing IT solutions across the globe, Luis has been exposed to a wide variety of business problems many of which he has solved by adopting traditional SOA architectures, API management, and now Microservice Architectures. As CTO of Capgemini’s UK Oracle DU, his current focus is in setting up the strategic technology direction for the practice and also in assisting key client accounts define and implement strategic solutions using modern Oracle and open source technologies that can help realize business benefits.

Having always had a natural talent for software, computers, and engineering in general, Luis's career in software started from an early age. Even before starting university, Luis's entrepreneurial spirit led him to start several ventures, including one of the very first social media websites in his country of origin (Venezuela) as well as a small software development firm. Although none of these ventures turned into a multi-million corporation, the experience and knowledge gained during this period led him to develop the passion for distributed software computing that inevitable led to SOA.

Luis is the co-author of Oracle API Management 12c Implementation (2015, Packt Publishing), Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation (2013, Packt Publishing), as well as numerous articles and white papers. Luis is also a frequent speaker at industry events including Oracle OpenWorld, and most recently at Oracle Code London, Beijing, Sydney, and San Francisco. Luis holds an MS in Corporate Networks and Systems Integration from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) and a BS in Electronics Engineering from the Universidad Nueva Esparta.

I want to thank all co-authors and reviewers of this book, especially Phil Wilkins for being a crucial member of the implementation team and also for taking the initiative to write this title.

Most importantly, I want to thank my beautiful family—my wife, Elena, and gorgeous daughters, Helena, Clara, and Alicia for once again having to cope with daddy who was stuck in the computer, writing, instead of being outside playing in the park.

Phil Wilkins has spent over 25 years in the software industry with a breadth of experience in different businesses and environments from multinationals to software startups, and customer organizations including a global optical and auditory healthcare provider to specialist consulting.  He started out as a developer on real-time mission critical solutions, and has worked his way up through technical and development leadership roles primarily in Java-based environments. Phil now works for Capgemini in a multi-award winning team (which includes his co-authors) specializing in cloud integration and API technologies and more generally with Oracle technologies.

Beyond his day job, Phil has contributed his knowledge and experience by providing input and support to the development of technical books (particularly with Packt Publishing), including co-authoring Implementing Oracle Integration Cloud Service. In addition to this, he has also had a number of articles published in technical journals in his own right as well as being an active blogger. Phil has presented a broad range of industry events from Oracle Open World in San Francisco to Special Interest Groups and Meetups, including running an Oracle Developer Meetup in London. Phil is also a member of the Middleware & Integration Special Interest Group Committee among others.  Phil's expertise and contributions to the Oracle community have been acknowledged by Oracle by accrediting him as an Oracle Ace.

When not immersed in work and technology, he spends his downtime pursuing his passion for music and spending time with his wife and two boys.

Firstly, I’d like to thank my co-authors who have taken on the challenge of writing this book and those who have helped us with the development of the content such as Oracle’s Product Management and The A-Team. 

I would like to thank those who have offered the opportunities and encouraged and supported me over the years which has helped me to get to position to have this book become a reality. 

Lastly, but most importantly to me, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my wife, Catherine, and our two sons, Christopher and Aaron, for tolerating the many hours that I have spent in front of a computer not only on this project, but the many that have proceeded and those that will surely follow.