About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.
Randy serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He is a leading expert on architectures and design approaches for building enterprise applications that are secure and resilient in the face of continuous business and technology change. This makes service-oriented architecture (SOA) one of Randy's primary focus areas. Since enterprise applications need much more than SOA, Randy led the development of Forrester's digital business architecture, which provides a broad architectural context around SOA. For seven years, Randy has been a driving force for Forrester's research on application architecture trends, concepts, patterns, and best practices.
Particular focus areas within Randy's research include general application architecture and design issues; overall SOA strategy; SOA platform and infrastructure strategy; core SOA design concepts; Web services architecture; and standards, SOA security, SOA, and Web services management. He also covers coordination and leadership of other analysts' SOA work. Randy continues to develop strategies and structures to guide enterprises' longer-term evolution toward digital business architecture.
Randy has extensive experience with enterprise architecture management and application architecture and design. Randy was a chief architect at Sprint, where he led enterprise architecture and standardization efforts, along with the analysis and introduction of application servers, component architectures, object-oriented development, application security architectures, CORBA, distributed transaction management, and other new technologies. His IT experience also includes technology leadership, management, and application development with a Big Five consultancy and in the retail and litigation support industries.
Randy received a bachelor's of business administration from Baylor University's business school, where he was named the outstanding student in computer information systems.
Four opposing forces complicate digital experience delivery: the need for speed of initial delivery and ongoing change, the need to deliver experiences that are coherent and familiar across chan...
Integration is a perennial challenge for application development and delivery (AD&D;) professionals. Vintage, monolithic applications are hard to deal with, and point solutions abound, including ...
Application development and delivery (AD&D;) professionals need a foundation for recasting their integration strategies to meet 21st-century demands for business agility. Forrester's vision for d...
IT's traditional approach to delivering business change is broken. Siloed solution delivery projects struggle to keep up with the pace of business. Agile development, lean software, and business...
In the midst of continuing economic, political, competitive, and technological disruption over the next decade, your enterprise architecture (EA) practice will flounder unless it gains clear vis...
Most architects now recognize that service-oriented architecture (SOA) is much more than Web services (WS) standards and better application integration. SOA continues to gain industry recognitio...
With 74% of the Global 2000 now using service-oriented architecture (SOA), most architects recognize that SOA is about much more than Web services and better application integration. SOA continu...
Some of the most compelling cloud computing stories are public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) stories: stories of companies using many servers for a short time and charging that use to a cre...
Some think of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as just Web services standards to achieve better application integration. However, SOA is gaining recognition as a key element of strategic busi...
As part of their application platform strategies, enterprise architects should become familiar with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. PaaS is one of the multiple categories of offerings th...
The rise of rich internet, mobile, and programmable web applications, and particularly the tools and scripting languages associated with them, has given rise to the style of services known as "A...
View All Randy Heffner's Planned Reports