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Rhys Lewis

About the Author

Primarily a software designer and developer, Rhys Lewis has more than 21 years experience in the IT industry. He has worked with most commonly used computer systems, from mainframes to PCs and Unix systems.

Rhys spent his early years developing large, mainframe-based, transaction processing applications for internal use within IBM. These were PL/1 applications running under IBM’s IMS DB/DC software. He later worked as a systems programmer, maintaining IMS installations and associated products.

Following this exposure to large systems, Rhys spent several years at IBM’s UK Scientific Center, where he researched image-processing applications for use in medical diagnosis. During this period, he published a number of papers and completed his first book, Practical Digital Image Processing. Also during this period, he brought one image-processing product to market for IBM, and ran a development team that subsequently delivered a second product.

After working at the Scientific Center, Rhys moved into consulting and services, where he specialized in applications for IBM’s then newly introduced RS/6000 Unix systems. As part of a small team, he designed and developed a number of custom-built solutions for IBM customers and provided technical support for RS/6000 Value Added Remarketers. During this time, he also became involved in education and technical support for DCE and for IBM’s distributed CICS products.

In 1992, Rhys joined IBM’s MQSeries development team, where he designed and implemented the AIX and OS/2 versions. He subsequently worked on porting these products to other Unix systems, including HP-UX and NCR Unix. Being the original architect for the MQSeries cluster support, Rhys then joined the group of strategists who were looking at MQSeries product futures. During this period, he completed his second book, Messaging and Queuing Using the MQI. Written in conjunction with two of his IBM colleagues, this book covers the principles of message queuing in general, and in particular, IBM’s MQSeries.

After spending approximately 4 years with MQSeries product development and architecture, Rhys lived and worked in the USA for one year. He provided consulting and services on MQSeries to Andersen Consulting as part of an initiative to make them a major IBM business partner. During this time, Rhys provided enterprise architecture consultancy, developed a number of technical architectures based on message queuing, and delivered services to a number of Andersen Consulting clients.

In October of 1997, Rhys joined Candle Corporation, where he first worked on the Roma family of products as a senior software architect. He has since been working to understand the needs of Candle’s customers, and to formulate new features in Roma to meet these requirements. He has been involved with many aspects of the product, but has recently been concentrating on Roma’s interaction with Web-based products, distributed object systems, and object-oriented programming languages. Rhys is also heavily involved with Roma’s support and exploitation of XML.

Rhys is currently negotiating a contract for a third book on advanced techniques in message queuing applications. He has also been a regular contributor to major IBM conferences, and has given keynote presentations to large audiences. Rhys presents regularly at industry events, user groups, analyst events such as Xephon briefings, Candle and IBM events, and customer executive briefings.

Rhys has a Ph.D in Transient Kinetic Spectroscopy (a branch of Biochemistry) from King’s College, University of London, and he holds a first class honors degree in Biophysics from the University of Leeds. He was born in 1954 in Bristol, England; he is currently living in Winchester, England with his wife and two sons, Andrew and Peter. When he is not working or writing, Rhys enjoys sailing his 18 foot catamaran Cat-A-Tonic and tinkering with boats.