Thomas Erl is a top-selling IT author, founder of Arcitura Education Inc., and series editor of the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl. With more than 200,000 copies in print worldwide, his books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major IT organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Accenture, IEEE, HL7, MITRE, SAP, CISCO, HP, and many others. As CEO of Arcitura Education Inc., Thomas has led the development of curricula for the internationally recognized Big Data Science Certified Professional (BDSCP), Cloud Certified Professional (CCP), and SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) accreditation programs, which have established a series of formal, vendor-neutral industry certifications obtained by thousands of IT professionals around the world. Thomas has toured more than 20 countries as a speaker and instructor. More than 100 articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine.

Robert Cope has more than 25 years of experience in mission-critical systems development, spanning all aspects of the software system engineering lifecycle from architectural development, experimentation and prototyping, requirements development, design, implementation, and operations to acquisition program management for large systems. With more than 10 years in research, development, and implementation of security architecture, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security technology, and security services for large organizations, he has vast experience in information assurance, identity management deployment, operations, and maintenance of large-scale high assurance identity management enclaves.

Robert is the CEO of Homeland Security Consultants, a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)-approved Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO) for certifying cloud services. He led the development of the virtualization and cloud computing architecture for a large organization and was the chief architect responsible for the development of an enterprise authentication service, leading a team to integrate the organization’s identity and access management service architecture using Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) and the System Modeling Language (SysML).

Robert is a Certified Trainer for Arcitura’s Cloud School and SOA School. He has been a contributing member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud-adapted Risk Management Framework (CRMF) and a contributing member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) IdCloud Technical Committee. He is also a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE).

A certified IT professional with over 14 years of experience in solution architecture and design, engineering, and consultation, Amin Naserpour specializes in designing medium to enterprise-level complex solutions for partially to fully virtualized front-end infrastructures. His portfolio includes clients such as VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix, and his work consists of integrating front-ends with back-end infrastructure-layer solutions. Amin designed a unified, vendor-independent cloud computing framework that he presented at the 5th International SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium in 2012. Certified in cloud computing, virtualization, and storage, Amin currently holds Technical Consultant and Cloud Operations Lead positions for Hewlett-Packard, Australia.