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.
As I discuss with clients the developing notions of Forrester's Business Capability Architecture (see blog post #1 and blog post #2), I have found it important to distinguish between different...
If your organization is like nearly every other one I've talked to in the past 20+ years, you have a spaghetti chart of integration connections between all the siloed applications that run your...
While we've seen many examples of mergers and acquisitions, what is the expert opinion on opportunities when an organization separates into separate entities, in the context of architecture? Are...
Step back and think: How would you answer the question, “What does your IT group deliver to your business?” Your answer will indicate how you think about the relationship between business...
I talk commonly to architects that are under pressure to create a cloud strategy. Or an SOA strategy. Or a BPM strategy. Or an XYZ strategy. Many will add up a few of these point strategies and call...
Here's a flash of the blindingly obvious: More and more products are going digital. You know this, but what I'm interested in is how they are going digital and to what degree....
In discussions on cloud computing, I often talk to architects who have been told to create a "cloud strategy." This sounds appropriate enough, but there’s a devil in the details: When the...
Can you remember a year when your business both (1) grew in a healthy way and (2) changed more slowly than the year before? Besides a company’s early startup years, such would be the exception,...
How do REST and SOAP support stateful Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) services via stateless EJB web services, as web service standards do not directly support stateful interactions?
Forrester Principal Analyst, Randy Heffner is currently conducting research on how enterprise architects should incorporate cloud computing into their organizations’ IT strategies and...
With all the excitement about cloud and mobile devices, do you feel that SOA is critical to the success of the cloud? More and more of our data is going to be separated outside of the internal...
Forrester’s recent book, Empowered, describes the type of technology-based innovation by frontline employees that can cause nightmares for enterprise architects. New tools for business...
There’s a big mistake often made with business architecture — a very big mistake, yet a very subtle mistake. As you might expect, there are a number of mistakes one might make with...
Social networking is hot, and it’s smart to think about how your organization might use it to generate benefit equal to the market hype. As you develop your social technology strategy,...
One of my favorite Forrester survey statistics to quote about SOA is the proportion of service-oriented architecture (SOA) users that see how important SOA can be for changing their business. In our...
Part of our application is in the cloud, and we want to insert it into our service-oriented architecture (SOA). What are the interactions between cloud computing and SOA? How do we evaluate risk,...