Mr. Tandon is an Executive IT Architect with IBM's Global Business Services group. He specializes in interfacing with senior client business and IT management in the evaluation, planning, development and implementation of 'end-to-end' e-Business solutions based on emerging internet and web technologies. He is currently working as Chief Infrastructure Engineer on a large defense program. In addition to twenty plus years of IT experience in USA, Mr. Tandon has worked on significant international assignments in Canada, Australia, India, The Netherlands, UK, and Malaysia. Mr. Tandon has published papers in IEEE and other industry journals and had earlier presented a SOA paper in Open Group's Architecture Practitioner's conference. The views expressed in this article are his personal opinion and are not endorsed by his employer. Contact him at rtandon@us.ibm.com.

Presentation
Value of a Solution Architecture Group in a Service Oriented Development Environment

In this presentation we first identify the need for solution architects during design and development of distributed service oriented applications. Design of complex systems have typically needed architects from various streams such as application, hardware, system, network, security and data architects. When these architects are individually and separately responsible for their own areas of work with no single point of responsibility for the total solution, it results in system errors and implementation delays. This becomes more apparent as these systems are increasingly following Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design principles which require modular design, loose coupling, dynamic discovery, independence from underlying infrastructure and externalization of services. These architecture streams are intricately inter-linked and need to be managed under a single solution architecture group. We go on to describe the structure and composition of this group and then outline the skills and experience requirements of a solution architect.

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