Like you, I was once puzzled by the mystery of reliable distributed systems, back in 1993 already. I started learning about it and even went on to get a PhD from ETH Zürich, Switzerland. I didn't stop there: I founded a company (Atomikos) and the only thing we do is transaction management. I still do some research today, and try to publish a paper every now and then.

At Atomikos, our story is one of ruthless simplification by keeping only the things that work. For instance, we pioneered JEE without application server in 2006. Later we adhered to SOA without ESB. I am proud to say that we got Gartner's "Cool Vendor" award for our work.

Today we help our customers move away from the application server. We help them transition to enterprise-grade microservices instead. With microservices, transactions become *distributed* transactions whether you like it or not. For most people that is a challenge. Not for us: we have decades of pioneering experience under our belt.