Richard is the Director of Product Management for cloud computing provider CenturyLink, a Microsoft MVP, blogger, author, trainer and frequent public speaker. He has spent the majority of his career working with organizations as they planned and implemented their enterprise software solutions. Richard worked first for two global IT consulting firms where he gained exposed to a diverse range of industries, technologies, and business challenges. Then, Richard joined Microsoft as a SOA/BPM technology specialist where his sole objective was to educate and collaborate with customers as they considered, designed, and built application integration solutions. He then accepted a job at biotechnology leader Amgen where he designed a wide range of global systems before becoming the lead architect of the R&D division. Richard now works at CenturyLink Cloud where he contributes to product strategy and development while actively collaborating with the cloud computing community.Richard is the author or contributor to three recent books: "Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform" (Packt Publishing, 2010) , "SOA Patterns with BizTalk Server 2009″ (Packt Publishing, 2009) , and "Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration" (Packt Publishing, 2011).Richard maintains a regularly updated blog on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.