Why so quiet? I took a couple days around Thanksgiving for an unplanned home project, and now I’m prepping for next week’s SOA Consortium meeting in Santa Clara. As always, the meeting is open to the public. The meeting theme is SOA Success, Lessons and Futures.
Featured sessions include Ross Altman of Sun Microsystems on the Future of SOA, Harvinder Kalsi of Cisco on Cisco’s internal SOA implementation, and a special two-part panel discussion with several of our case study contest winners.
Ross Altman, CTO, SOA and Business Integration, Sun Microsystems, on The Future of SOA — Myths and Realities
Clearly, over the next five years, more vendors will put more “SOA” into more applications and tooling. And, just as clearly, more enterprise developers will use SOA to inform the architecture, development process and governance model that they implement for their future projects. But, what does that really mean? How many services provided by the COTS application vendors will be reusable? How many of these vendors will endorse and implement standards that make their services “pluggable”? How many development projects in end-user enterprises will develop services that can be leveraged by multiple projects within that enterprise?
This session will discuss these and other questions that get at a key dilemma facing IT over the next five years: Is SOA really going to rule the future of IT? Or, will SOA be dismissed as “just another good idea that was over-hyped and misunderstood”?Harvinder Kalsi, IT Architect, Cisco Systems on Success with SOA: a Cisco IT Case Study
Cisco’s IT organization has adopted SOA as a key pillar of its IT enablement strategy. In this session, Harvinder Kalsi, an IT architect responsible for SOA across Cisco, will describe the evolution of SOA adoption within Cisco IT, including steps taken along the way to overcome several enterprise-scale technical and operational issues, as well as actions taken to improve business-IT alignment which have become internal best practices. Key to Cisco’s successful use of SOA has been consideration of available network services early in the process in order to ensure that security, performance, and scalability were maintained as application services were rolled out on a global scale. The resulting solutions have delivered solid improvements in efficiency and productivity throughout the company.
CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest Winners Panel Discussion
Adoption of Service Oriented Architecture is now ramping up, but most organizations are still finding their way. These organizations, however, have shown more than promise — they’ve shown return on investment. The SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine are proud to present three winners of the SOA Consortium / CIO Magazine SOA Case Study Awards Program. Winners in government, healthcare and technology will explain how they succeeded with SOA, lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.
CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest Winners Panel Discussion Part 2: Futures
In a follow-on to the lunch-time panel discussion, our case study contest winners will discuss SOA futures, touching on a variety of topics related to taking their SOA to the next level, including, business value opportunities, organizational implications (people, process, roles), technology and industry gaps (practices, technology and skills).
And those great sessions are just the beginning…
On Wednesday afternoon, Professor Gregor Engels from Capgemini sd&m AG will share insights on Service Oriented Design, a Key Competency for SOA Success. After Professor Engels’ talk, I’ll lead the group in a discussion on SOA lessons, reaching into our vast collection of case studies, anecdotes, best practices and tips related to adopting SOA for business value.
On Thursday morning, we have three great invited speakers:
Ken Rubin, Chief Healthcare Architect, EDS Civilian Government & DoD Healthcare Portfolio on The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare
As a market sector, the healthcare industry is generally a market laggard, especially when considering technology adoption relating to information systems. While there is a strong appetite and interest in cutting-edge medical devices and technologies, investment in systems is viewed as an expense that takes away from the core mission. As a result, creating interest in SOA and dialogue around business transformation involving SOA is a very hard conversation to have, and healthcare vendors have been reticent to support SOA efforts.
In order to stimulate the dialogue, and ultimately the demand for SOA solutions, OMG and HL7 have authored “The Practical Guide for SOA in Healthcare.” While the guide was written to a healthcare audience, the advice is equally applicable in any market segment. This is an informative document that attempts to answer the “now what?” question, capitalizing on the industry hype and name recognition that SOA brings, but casting it in an actionable approach that business leaders and their senior technology staff can use. This talk will present an overview of the “Practical Guide”, talk to the business challenges that SOA can effectively address, and make the case for industry-vertical SOA standards.
Joseph A. di Paolantonio, President, and Clarise Z. Doval Santos, PMP, CTO, InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. lead an interactive session on SOA, Master Data Management and Software as a Service
An interactive session based upon a mindmap for developing a system architecture using Master Data Management (MDM), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) principles. The goal is not to talk about having an enterprise mashup with salesforce.com, but how to apply these principles to internal enterprise initiatives. We’ll discuss the success, lessons learned and future of integrating MDM & SOA, and how this approach allows IT to provision business needs quickly through a SaaS approach to the users. Bring your own experiences and ideas, as we’ll be expanding the mindmap in the direction you want. A PDF of the basic mindmap will be emailed to all members of the SOA-C and be included in the meeting handout. Changes to the mindmap made during the session will be posted after the meeting.
Suresh Chandrasekaran, Senior VP, North America, Denodo Technologies on Data Mashups Accelerating the Delivery of SOA Value, a case study
This case study will examine how a CIO leveraged a funded SOA project to help create short-term business value through an Enterprise Data Mashup solution — delivering real-time access to composite views of data integrated across internal and external sources. The mashup data services were initially created to enable a customer self-service portal, and then reused for internal call centers, partner extranets, and business intelligence applications.
On Thursday afternoon, we’ll share and discuss outputs from our working groups, and leave time for an “attendees choice topic”.
As always, the SOA Consortium meeting is open to the public. If you have a business-driven view of SOA, want to connect with real SOA practitioners and enjoy your content marketing-free, this is the meeting for you. To register, go here. On site registration is available.
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]
