Acknowledgments

Writing a book is a strenuous journey. We are indebted to many people who helped us along the way.

Murali Padmanabhan, at the time coordinating the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) learning and development initiative, established our early contact to Elsevier India. Without his efforts the book idea would never have taken off in the first place.

We are sincerely grateful to the TCS management, in particular to Krishnan Ramanujam and Santosh Mohanty, for their motivation, support, and friendly eye toward the book. Hermann Klein and Ingo Rosenstein, by their kind permission, made it possible for us to work on the book project.

Many thanks go to numerous colleagues at TCS, especially to Harish Iyer, Bernd Linowski, and Ameya Vanjari. They not only listened to our continuous rambles about architecture; they also provided many useful insights in return.

Ravindra Asundi, Beate Beering, Dirk Fiege, Bernd Linowski, and Gero Seifert took the trouble to struggle through 180 pages of the half-finished book to uncover the structural weaknesses, and they kindly and patiently pointed out how we could fix them. We are deeply grateful for the time they invested, and the gentle yet effective feedback they gave.

Bhadresh Vyasa, Sandeep Karkera, and Vinu Jade dedicated their time to the project by allowing us to interview them in depth about their experiences in various aspects of EA. Many thanks for that!

We are indebted to several eminent authors in our field, most notably John Zachman from Zachman International, Jeanne W. Ross from the Center for Information Systems Research at the Massachusetts lnstitute of Technology, and Steve Nunn and Andrew Josey from The Open Group for their kind permission, backed by active support, to reprint some of their intellectual property in this book.

Craig Mullins and Wayne Eckerson reviewed the final manuscript, providing many useful comments and improvement proposals. Our heartfelt thanks also go to the editors at Morgan Kaufmann: Rachel Roumeliotis, Andrea Dierna, and Robyn Day. You all effectively helped us through the tedious exercise of writing and finishing this book on time.

Last but not least, our sincere gratitude goes to our wives. They willingly accepted the sight of husbands brooding over their laptops on weekends. They agreed to family funds flowing into a writing workshop in India instead of into long-deserved family vacations. Furthermore, they actively supported our work in numerous ways, from discussions over proofreading to stepping in when we (again) neglected our household duties in favor of an authors’ phone conference. Beate, Christiane, and Deepali, we definitely owe you one.