About the Authors

Ashwin Kumar Karkala, a software development manager, is based out of Bangalore and is part of the Enterprise Manager Product group at Oracle. He has around 12 years of experience in the IT industry and has developed a wide range of enterprise grade solutions for various industries. At Oracle, he has worked on multiple versions of the Enterprise Manager Grid Control product and is responsible for developing solutions in many areas, some of which include Business Services Management, middleware diagnostics, cloud management, and identity management. His other areas of interest include Service Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0 technologies.

I extend my sincere thanks to my parents, my wife Sandhya, and my kids Anup and Stuthi, for their patience and support over many a weekend that I spent writing this book.

I also thank my management chain at Oracle—Richard Sarwal, Ali Siddiqui, Rajiv Maheshwari, and Rahul Goyal for extending their fullest support towards this book.

I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends—Sundar Ramaswami, Priya Ulaganathan, Rajesh Polavarapu, and Arvind Maheshwari who helped and supported us at various stages while writing this book.

I also thank the team at Packt Publishing including Kerry George, Zainab Bagasrawala, Susmita Panda, Merwine Machado, and Azharuddin Shaikh who patiently worked with us and helped the book see the light of day.

Many thanks to the technical reviewers—William Vambenepe, Hari Rao, and Eric Bowman for taking the time to read the drafts and providing us with valuable inputs that helped elevate the standard of the content.

Last but not least, this book would not have become a reality without the passion, dedication and hard work of my co-author Govinda Raj Sambamurthy. I thank him whole heartedly for making this journey worthwhile.

Govinda Raj Sambamurthy, is a principal member technical staff in the content management space in the Oracle Fusion Middleware team at Bangalore, and is responsible for building highly available and highly scalable enterprise middleware products. He has around nine years of experience in the IT industry and has played the role of developer, consultant, and technical lead in developing software for banking and financial, retail, and telecom verticals as well as product development, building enterprise solutions that are deployed in high-availability architectures. He was part of the Service-Level Management pack development team in Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g and 11gR1. His areas of interest include business services management, middleware diagnostics, service-level management, cloud computing, enterprise 2.0, and semantic Web.

I thank my mother Padma who has been an inspiration all through my life, for her immense support and continuous encouragement. I would like to extend thanks to my wife Nithya, for her patience and support in letting me use precious family time over weekends to work on this book.

I also thank my management chain at Oracle—Hari Rao, Frank Radichel, and Hasan Rizvi for allowing me to fit this book into my schedule, and for their constant encouragement.

I also thank my colleagues Rahul Goyal, Arvind Maheshwari, Chandrasekhar Atla, Rama Vijjapurapu, Sreekanth Chintala, and Venkatesh Yadalam for their help at various stages of this book.

I also thank the team at Packt Publishing including Kerry George, Zainab Bagasrawala, Susmita Panda, Merwine Machado, Azharuddin Shaikh and others from the publishing team for all their support.

A special thanks to our technical reviewers—Hari Rao, William Vambenepe, and Eric Bowman who took time off their busy schedules to read the drafts and provided us with technical inputs.

Last but not least, the commitment, resolve and efforts of my co-author Ashwin Kumar Karkala were essential in planning and executing this with the finesse of a project delivery. I thank him whole heartedly for ensuring this a success.