Oliver Sims is internationally recognized as a leader in the design and implementation of distributed business object and component systems. He served for several years on the OMG Architecture Board and has been active in various OMG Task Forces since 1994. Author of "Business Objects”, co-author of “Building Business Objects” and “Business Component Factory,” he has many published articles to his credit. In the paper Revisiting Sims (presented at the OOPSLA'97 Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation), Mark Baker said, “Oliver Sims is regarded as the father of today's business object movement, in large part due to the success of his book, ‘Business Objects; Delivering Cooperative Objects for Client/Server’.”

During his career in IT, Oliver has accumulated broad practical experience in areas that include: transition management, system and application design and development, development methodologies, transaction processing, data design, middleware design and development, system and network sizing and performance, project management, internationalization, user interface design principles, system and software architecture, distributed systems, and international standards. His domain experience includes manufacturing, insurance, banking, retail, utilities, distribution, trading, and telecommunications. About ten years ago, Oliver originated the "Cooperative Business Object" concept, which first demonstrated the synergy between distributed objects and component software, and which was implemented by the "Newi" product from Integrated Object Systems (an IBM joint venture).

Oliver has that rare combination of technical depth, excellent presentation skills, keen marketing awareness, and the ability to communicate complex ideas simply. As a pragmatic visionary, he understands that, while any endeavor must have a goal or vision, any such vision must be clearly tied to business goals, and its achievement must be practicable and viable. His focus has been the reduction of complexity for the application developer in the context of large-scale distributed component systems, which is accomplished through an architecture of middleware “separation layers” and frameworks that hide complexities from developers while enabling them to exploit distributed object and component concepts. In the course of this work, he has developed significant understanding of the methodological implications inherent in building such systems. Oliver was also a major contributor to the EC COMBINE project.