Thomas Erl

Thomas Erl (born 1967) is a Canadian-born author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. Erl helped define and popularize Service-orientation and Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and is the founder of a vendor-neutral SOA training & certification program.
Background
Erl is an SOA author, series editor of the Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl, and editor of the SOA Magazine. Erl has been a pioneer in laying down the core principles of Service Oriented Computing and SOA Design Patterns for building vendor-neutral service-oriented systems. Erl has built an ecosystem around SOA through books and various websites (SOASchool, SOASpecs, SOAGlossary, etc.) for the practitioners to design distributed systems that can adhere to the strategic goals and benefits of SOA. Erl defined eight specific principles of service design for service-orientation. These principles were published in 2005 in his book Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design, and in 2005 edition of SOA World Magazine.
Erl is the founder of SOA Systems Inc., a global provider of vendor-neutral training, certification and consulting services in the areas of Service-Oriented Computing, SOA and Cloud Computing.
Erl regularly participates in the SOA Symposium and Gartner conferences. Over 100 articles and interviews by Erl have been published in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine.
Publications
Since his first publication in 2004, Erl has published - usually as collective work - several more books. All books are based on the one consistently formed concept of service orientation. Each book has a different angle educating and teaching the concept, the philosophies, history and other aspects of service orientation in perspective of the targeted audience.
Erl spearheaded a community movement which resulted in the publication of a master pattern catalog, SOA Design Patterns. SOA Design Patterns was the result of a three year SOA community collaborative effort and produced a master pattern catalog of 85 patterns for the industry.
Erl is the founding member of the SOA Manifesto Working Group and co-chairs the SOA Education Committee. , the SOA Manifesto had been signed by over 700 signatories and translated to nine languages: Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Tamil. Erl is also responsible for drafting the annotated version of the SOA Manifesto.
Selected bibliography
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Other notable contributions
In order to provide a structure and an understanding of the development of SOA projects, Erl presented a methodology that is based around the analysis and design of services. Erl's often-referenced definition of SOA reads as "a standards based architectural approach for building applications by using a set of loosely coupled reusable, standards-based, and well-defined services."

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