Interests [MORE]

I aim to make building distributed and integrated solutions less difficult and error-prone by collecting and documenting Integration Patterns from many client projects. It all started with a paper at the PLoP 2002 conference, which evolved into a successful book, published in 2003. By now (2018) more than 75,000 copies have been sold.

I also help large organizations transform their IT infrastructure and processes to reduce cost and complexity while increasing software delivery velocity. You can find the related book and information at architectelevator.com.

Short Bio

Gregor advises CTOs and technology leaders in the transformation of both their organization and technology platform. Riding the Architect Elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, he assures that corporate strategy connects with the technical implementation and vice versa.

Gregor held positions as a Singapore Smart Nation Fellow and technical director in Google Cloud's Office of the CTO, where he helped customers maximize the value from a cloud-based IT model, and as Chief Architect at Allianz SE, where he oversaw the architecture of a global data center consolidation and deployed the first private cloud software delivery platform.

Gregor is known as co-author of the seminal book "Enterprise Integration Patterns", which is widely cited as the reference vocabulary for asynchronous messaging solutions. His book "37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation" tells stories from the trenches of IT transformation while his articles have been featured in "Best Software Writing" by Joel Spolsky and "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know". He is an active member of the IEEE Software advisory board.

My Books

I enjoy writing because putting my thoughts into words forces me to clarify my thinking and allows me to share it with a wide audience.

Chapters and Contributions

Disclosures

Martin Fowler inspired me to state a bit about my financial and other interests.

I am a full-time employee of AWS. I am good friends with the founders or main committers of almost all open source ESB players, so I tend to pull examples from their products without favoring a particular one.

I hold stocks in mutual funds plus many of the popular IT companies, but not nearly enough to believe that my statements have any influence on their stock price or my net worth. Most of my stock is still in Google, of which I never sold a share.

I do monetize my site through Amazon's affiliate program, although it's barely enough money for a few beers. I occasionally request free review copies from publishers without any obligation to post a positive review..

This Site

This site and it's design are about as old as EIP - over 15 years. The site is completely static, rendered by a mix of Ant 1.7 and XSLT, and now deployed to Amazon S3 and CloudFront. I updated some of the HTML to be somewhat HTML 4.0 compliant, but a lot of it is still the way the Web was around 2002. Bless backwards compatibility!

Projects [MORE]

The domain of Enterprise Integration Patterns is much broader than asynchronous messaging. That's why I am trying to collect more Enterprise Integration Patterns, mostly focused on stateful interactions between systems. But it's slow going...

A long time ago, I created a number of tools to automate tedious EAI development, such as StubGen (a code generator for TIBCO AE) and TibDoc (a documentation generation tool). I have also created a messaging toolkit that demonstrates the patterns in my book. I am in the process of open-sourcing it.

» More very old Projects