His official bio lists him as an internationally known cloud computing visionary, technology innovator, and agent of change. He’s written countless books, including the bestselling Enterprise Application Integration. He’s been CTO of cash generators SAGA Software and Mercator Software, as well as CEO of BRIDGEWERX.
You probably know him from his regular cloud computing column for InfoWorld, or his Cloud Computing Weekly Podcast series, or his numerous keynotes at countless conferences through the years. He’s unquestionably a digital innovator.
So what is Dave Linthicum’s secret to success?
“Lots of people can be good managers and leaders,” Linthicum explains. “Not so many people can take ideas to the next level. People expect me to do that.”
Path to Thought Leadership
His career kicked off in the early 1990s at Mobil Oil, where he was a C++ developer among other duties. Mobil struggled to integrate their applications, leading Linthicum to work with integration pioneer TIBCO.
However, TIBCO – and the rest of the nascent integration market – was still in its early stages. “TIBCO was just a publish/subscribe engine at the time,” Linthicum recalls. “We still had to write transformations, connect to [IBM] MQSeries, etc. This limited our capabilities.”
In other words, he had to figure stuff out as he went along, a common characteristic among thought leaders. As his team got the hang of application integration, he began to educate his colleagues, and that effort led to his first book, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
It’s unusual for techies with no particular writing background to have the discipline to write such a book. Linthicum’s secret? “You have to give up stuff. Spend less time on things you enjoy,” he says. “It’s tough to get the discipline to write one to two thousand words per day, but you have to do so to crank out a book.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/01/14/digital-influencer-catching-up-with-david-linthicum-sage-of-the-cloud/.
