About the Authors
John Schmidt’s integration career began over 30 years ago when he was a hardware technician at Digital Equipment Corporation. He tells the story about plugging a PDP-11 cable into the wrong socket, which put 30 volts rather than 5 volts on the bus and fried every chip connected to it. Hence the first lesson in integration: While the plug might fit in the socket, hidden incompatibilities in behavior that are not readily visible can be disastrous.
John went on to work as a software engineer, project manager, sales representative, professional services manager, program manager, and enterprise architect. He has practiced and honed his integration expertise in half a dozen industries (banking, retail, telecommunications, education, government, and utilities) and in just as many countries. John was director and chairman of the Integration Consortium for eight years, has written numerous articles on systems integration and enterprise architecture, developed program management practices, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
John’s current role is vice president of Global Integration Services at Informatica. He advises clients on the business potential of emerging technologies; leads in the creation of strategies for enterprise initiatives; and plans, directs, and supervises Informatica’s Integration Competency Center Practice. He graduated from Red River College and holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.
David Lyle’s career has traveled from the hardware world of computer design to the software world of product development, and along the way he developed early massively parallel (MPP) UNIX systems and associated parallel RDBMS systems for Unisys. While working on the field implementations of these large-scale data warehousing systems, he began noticing consistent, recurring patterns.
From these experiences, David helped found Influence Software, one of the early packaged analytic applications companies. Informatica bought Influence Software at the end of 1999, and for three years David led the R&D organization that built the packaged business intelligence content, the data models, and the preconfigured data integration logic for extracting data out of the most common ERP and CRM systems. After Informatica divested itself of these packaged applications to focus on its core business of data integration, David turned his attention to guiding Informatica’s product direction, based upon the “after-market” tools and utilities his earlier organization had used to automate common integration patterns or solve many of the challenges they faced. These ideas culminated in Informatica’s Metadata Manager, automated generation of integration logic following configurable architecture patterns, and patents on using canonical data virtualization techniques within integration architectures to move toward elimination of point-to-point integration approaches.
David is currently vice president of Product Strategy, where he continues to guide the longer-term vision for how the Informatica platform assists organizations in integrating and managing their data more efficiently and effectively. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s of science in electrical engineering.