Robert G. Laird is an architect with IBM in the SOA Advanced Technologies group, performing worldwide consulting for IBM customers in the area of SOA governance, SOA architecture, and telco architecture. He has previously coauthored Executing SOA for Pearson Publishing, and has also written white papers and articles on SOA and SOA governance. He has more than 30 years of industry and consulting experience. Bob worked at MCI (a U.S. telco) as the chief architect, where he led the Enterprise Architecture group and the creation of an SOA-based single-stack strategy for multiple legacy applications and networks, and led automation projects in network management, provisioning, and restoration. He also consulted nationally for American Management Systems.