Every year, large organizations find their IT systems becoming more complex, and more diverse -- and the need for effective enterprise integration becomes more urgent. In this book, Chris Britton offers IT architects and decision-makers practical start-to-finish guidance for defining architectures and choosing middleware strategies that integrate the entire enterprise, maximizing flexibility, resiliency, scalability, security, and manageability. IT Architectures and Middleware gives IT professionals expert guidance for identifying key architectural issues, and building complex distributed systems with confidence and foresight. Rather than focusing on a specific technology such as COM, CORBA, or Enterprise Java Beans, Chris Britton starts with the realities of IT in the enterprise: its massive size and accelerating growth rates. Britton helps system architects rise above the hype and evade the vendor crossfire, presenting a quick survey of middleware technology, and offering guidance on the IT structures and middleware technologies most likely to address their business requirements. For all system architects, project managers, IT leaders and strategists.