The SOA Consortium just published the second podcast from our March meeting. This one features IBM’s Sandy Carter talking about Smart SOA(tm) in a Tough Economic Climate. Per usual, Sandy’s talk was full of customer anecdotes, my favorite was from StatOilHydro. Concerned with the environmental and revenue impacts of leaks during oil drilling, StatOil sought an innovative and automated way to detect leaks. They wanted to replace a manual process that included deep sea drivers. StatOil’s innovation, they attached RFID tags to the shells of blue mussels. When the blue mussels sense an oil leak, they close which prompts the RFID tags to emit closure events. In response to the events, the drilling line is automatically stopped. And, in case you are wondering, this is of no harm to the blue mussels. I tweeted this example during the session, and Richard Veryard quickly and cleverly coined “mollusc-driven architecture”.
To listen to an audio recording of Sandy’s presentation and view the slides go here. The full write-up of the session, pulled from my SOA Consortium Insights post, follows:
“Sandy Carter, IBM VP, SOA, BPM and WebSphere, spoke on the importance of taking a Smart SOA(tm) approach in a Tough Economic Climate, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC.
Carter began by sharing that customers are asking about, and employing, service-orientation and business process management not only to survive the economic crisis, but also to thrive and become more successful when the economic crisis ends. To this point, CEOs are equally concerned with cost optimization and agility. Carter was careful to distinguish cost optimization – re-using services, optimizing processes – from non-sustainable cost cutting.
In addition to the economic climate, Carter spoke of marketplace changes based on technology location and proliferation. There are one billion transistors for each person on earth. One trillion things connected to the Internet. And, by 2010, there will be 30 billion RFID tags embedded into our world. This pervasive connectivity and instrumentation provides innumerable opportunities to smarten our companies, countries and environment.
Interestingly, in each of the Smarter Planet examples Carter cited, such as StatOil’s RFID tagging of blue mussels to quickly identify and stop leaks during oil drilling, the solutions all had SOA at the core. When an attendee called out this theme, Carter shared that SOA has become control point of competitive advantage for companies. If you haven’t deployed yet, now is the time. If you have, now is the time to take your SOA to the next level.
To listen to an audio recording of Carter’s presentation and view the slides go here.
Following her presentation, Carter signed copies of her latest book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0, How to use ANGELS to Energize your Market.”
