About

My name is Simon Greig and I am an IBM Distinguished Engineer working for IBM Consulting.  I have worked for IBM pretty much all of my career since the small company I worked for when I first left university was bought by the mega corporation known as IBM very shortly after I started working.

I started my working life as a C++ developer. I enjoyed the challenge of development but soon realised that in a corporate world the developers tend to have less opportunity to be creative than they might do working in a smaller environment.  In order to get more control and influence over the technical creativity process I decided I wanted to be an IT Architect.

I very quickly fell into a sub category of architecture focussing on integration.  I found integration fascinating.  Specifically the problem solving aspects of connecting a number of heterogenous systems, applications and platforms together.  It is never as simple and clean as you want it to be.

I have been doing complex systems integration properly since about 1999 and am still at it. I have learned a lot along the way.  In the mid 2000s I was a thought leader in designing, creating and managing Enterprise Service Bus solutions.  I led the creation of what was known inside IBM as the "ESB Asset" which was a solution pattern and turned into a bit of a defacto standard way to create an ESB with WebSphere Message Broker.  The ESB asset was used 20-30 times globally and earned me and the team a lot of recognition within the company.

By the late 2000s I was working in Chief Architect roles on large complex systems integrations projects.  I say projects in the plural but it really only a couple a decade.  It is a bit tricky to work on a vast number of diverse projects when each project lasts 3-5 years!

My current area of interest is cloud integration.  Especially how the blazes do we integrate all that legacy good stuff in the enterprise to sub-systems and partners running on cloud platforms.