Career 6: The birth of Service Bus (v1.0)

 I was at a high-flying Wall Street Darling whose stocks skyrocketed spectacularly. I learnt all about service bus concepts there (I was the infrastructure architect). It had many innovative ideas I don't find anywhere else even today. Not sure if it was the very first service bus/orchestration engine combo around (I was not involved with the orchestration part). The patents filed on this with me as co-author pretty much describes the technology. It was an apps company where the apps revenue (which was their main source of revenue) dried up, and they tried to switch to be a middleware company based on our teams' efforts. Middleware till then was just an enabling tech for the apps. But there is no way an apps company can transform into a middleware company easily especially on the funding, sales, marketing, consulting and support parts. When it became crystal clear to me at least the company was headed towards failure, I shifted to a major middleware company in 2003. 

I was hired at the company as a program manager. I proceeded to redefine the role to have a huge architecture component (since there was no formal architect). I was often referred to informally as the architect of Service Bus by the team although I never had that formal title. Its architecture and design is completely different than what had been done earlier by the app company I mentioned. Many patents were filed with me as co-author. 

After the product shipped, besides remaining a program manager, I added a 3-person performance team and took on some management responsibilities because performance was a key focus (my sole real management role although I was a manager for a short time at the very start of my career when I was very green behind the ears). We tuned the product based on inputs by the team. A formal architect also finally stepped into place. 

The company was acquired by a big company in 2008. The service Bus is still alive in that company. 

Those two jobs were smooth with no real issues for me cropping up throughout. I enjoyed both of them. It was the most creative period for me.