I would like to thank my wife, Renuka, for her immense support and continuous encouragement and for her patience with all the late nights and weekend hours I have spent on the book in the past 9 months. I would also like to thank my kids, Nistha and Nisheet, who did not demand my attention while I wrote this book.

Many thanks to Rajiv Taori, Senior Director of Product Management and Ali Siddiqui, Vice President of Oracle Application and Systems Management Products for allowing me to fit this book into my busy schedule, and for their constant encouragement.

Thanks to Rajiv K. Maheshwari, Rao Bethanabotla, Madhav Sathe, Nicole Haba, Rahul Goyal, Senthil Saivam, Sandeep Pandita, Ajay Jagannatha Rao and the entire Enterprise Manager Middleware Management development team at Oracle for their help while writing the book.

Many thanks to James Lumsden, Srimoyee Ghoshal, Darshana Shinde, and Arani Roy, and the entire team at Packt Publishing for turning our drafts to a book! I would also like to extend my thanks to all the reviewers of the book.

Finally, I would like to thank my co-author Arvind Maheshwari for his hard work and help in completing the book.

I thank my wife Seema, kids Ashutosh and Anusha, for letting me use precious family time to work on this book.

I thank my management chain — Ali Siddiqui, Rajiv Maheshwari, and Rahul Goyal for supporting the idea of writing a book about Middleware management.

I thank Senthil Saivam, Manish Bisarya, Rishi Saraswat, Venkatesh Audinarayan, Govinda Sambamurthy, Sandeep Pandita, Rajiv Kuriakose, Ravi Ummadi, Suresh Kotha, Anil Kumar, Priya Ulaganathan, Rajesh Vemana, and all of my colleagues for their help and support while writing the book.

I thank my co-author Debu Panda — who provided guidance at every step of this project.

I thank Srimoyee Ghoshal and James Lumsden at Packt Publishing for coordinating this project and ensuring that this book sees the light of day.