I spent much of the second day talking with attendees, speakers, and SYS-CON staff about SOA, virtualization, and the conference in general. Overall, there was a general sentiment that the conference was a success and had some valuable content. One presentation from the day that really stood out was a case study from the banking industry — Delivering Big Bank Solutions with Community Banking Intimacy. The bank is Synovus, a regional bank in the southeastern part of the US with about 33 billion in assets spread across multiple lines of business (banking, financial management, brokerage, insurance, and more).

In a thick southern, ‘good ole boy’ style delivery, the speakers from Synovus described their approach as ‘Blue Collar SOA’, explaining: “…it may not be perty, but it works and we get a lot of value out of it.” The Synovus representatives went on to explain that while they did not set out to deploy a SOA solution, their business requirements and technology objectives led them in that direction. They went on to describe several keys to successful SOA adoption, including the following:

• Define and document a set of guiding principles
• Define and document a reference architecture that is consistent with those principles
• Identify standards, technologies, and products that can enable that architecture and communicate and manage this through governance
• Identify a business visible pilot project to convert the strategy and reference architecture into a real implementation
• Define and enforce the implementation strategy through governance processes
• Employ governance toolsets to validate services against guiding principles as well as policies and SLAs

The results of their SOA adoption as well as the importance of service orchestration is outlined in a white paper from Active Endpoints (their service orchestration partner).

The presenters concluded by identifying a huge list of lessons learned. Three things really stood out to me on that list:

1. Identify and document standards and best practices and enforce them through your governance processes
2. SOA changes your team dynamics — you will need more documenters than developers
3. Education is key because SOA is hard

That third one was especially of interest to me given Web Age’s focus upon SOA education. In the Q&A portion I asked for the folks from Synovus to elaborate on the education topic. They were eager to explain that they had discovered a huge gap between legacy skill sets and what it takes to be successful with SOA. They had to figure out how to translate those skills, bring people up to speed on new methodologies and terminologies and get people to think differently about how to solve problems. Synovus also discovered that considerable education and mentoring was necessary to help the leadership that direct their lines of business to “think outside their silo”. Amen!

At Web Age we have seen the same sorts of challenges and often discover that teaching the technologies is fairly simple. Teaching the methodologies is more difficult. Teaching the new mindset (e.g. ‘thinking outside the silo’) and providing business users with new tools and techniques for solving problems is even more difficult. So what is the most challenging? Getting organizations to actually change once they are educated. The technology side of SOA is relatively easy. The human side is where things get tricky.

Overall, the conference was a great experience. If you get a chance to catch the East coast or West coast shows next year, definitely go. I hope to see you there!

The first day of SOA World 2007 - West went very well. Miko Matsumura with Software AG / webMethods kicked things off with the keynote - Time Oriented Architecture: Evolution by Design? And he had some really entertaining 3-D animation and virtual simulations in his presentation. It was pretty cool. The next presentation in the main room was by Theo Beack from BEA - Virtualized SOA: Adaptive Infrastructure for Demanding Applications.

I delivered the third presentation of the day in the main room - A Little SOA Goes A Long Way, discussing the importance of identifying which aspects of your enterprise are ripe for service orientation and which areas are better left alone. The outline for that presentation is as follows:

• Introduction
• Why SOA initiatives fail
• What my kids taught me about SOA
• Adopting SOA selectively
• Bowling for governance
• Review

This presentation seemed to be well-received and I was particularly pleased with the broad acceptance of the Selective SOA Methodology that I presented. This methodology serves as the cornerstone for much of the SOA Adoption and SOA Governance mentoring that Web Age Solutions provides to clients. If you’d like a copy of the presentation, you can download it here — A Little SOA Goes A Long Way (PDF).

After a trip to the Expo Floor and some snacks, we were back in the main room to hear from Mike Pellegrini from Active Endpoints presenting - Your SOA Needs BPEL For Orchestration. He had some great content, but one nugget really stood out to me early in the presentation. Mike was describing services and processes as two kinds of abstractions that are important in SOA. After discussing them separately, he offered the following synthesis: “Services don’t change often, but they are orchestrated and re-orchestrated fairly often to build/modify business processes.” I like that. I would qualify it to say that services SHOULDN’T change often. In other words, I believe that this is indicative of an enterprise that has reached a considerable degree of maturity in their service orientation. Nonetheless, I thought it was a really solid characterization of services and processes.

Following Mike’s presentation, the speaker that was slated to speak in the main room could not be located. After hunting for about ten minutes, SYS-CON got desperate and accepted my offer to deliver another presentation that I had on my laptop. So I hopped up on stage, grabbed a mic, and fired up my laptop with the same presentation that I had delivered at SOAWorld in June early this year in New York - Service Oriented Patterns and Anti-Patterns. Fortunately, I had delivered that presentation about a month ago for a users group in Dallas, so I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the material. I was a little rushed for time due to the late start, but overall that presentation went rather well.

After a lunch break, Ian Thain of Sybase presented - Model-driven SOA. His presentation included some interesting demonstrations of model-driven SOA using Sybase tools. Next was another Expo Floor break and snacks, followed by the SOA Power Panel.

I had the pleasure of participating on the SOA Power Panel along with Miko Matsumura (Software AG / webMethods), Kevin Hakman (TIBCO), and Sandy Zylka (NextAxiom). Jeremy Geelan moderated and we had some great discussion around SOA, convergence with other trends, economic impacts, and more. The panel session was recorded and I will post a link to it once it is made available.

I don’t know what happened for the rest of the day as I was occupied by various discussions in the late afternoon and then in a bit of sight-seeing in the evening (Coit Tower, Treasure Island, Lombard Street, and more).

One of the challenges in working with companies in their early explorations into new technologies and methodologies is the inevitable backlash that occurs regarding change. Many have argued that at best, SOA brings nothing new to the table, and at worst it will fail to achieve the desired results for the enterprise (i.e. agility, reuse, interoperability, etc.) just as previous attempts such as OO, CORBA, and Web services have failed.

While I certainly believe that SOA is more of an evolution than a revolution, there are several key aspects that give me hope with respect to success for the service orientation of the enterprise.

• Business alignment — While previous attempts around system integration and componentization have had some success at achieving improved capabilities at a very low-level, many failed to achieve any sort of sustainable ROI. A principal reason for this was the lack of business alignment. Developing more flexible, interoperable, and reusable capabilities is great, but if they are not aligned with the business and where it is headed strategically, then failure is inevitable.
• Runtime governance — We’ve made a lot of strides in the areas of technology project management, management of design and user requirements, as well as configuration management of software. Unfortuantely, once we push our systems out into production, all of our plans and controls go out the window. The enablement of runtime governance of services that are managed by automatically enforceable policies is tremendous. This gives us a new dimension to controlling, influencing, and protecting the way in which enterprise components are used and represents a significant different over previous initiatives.
• Gravity — There is sometime to be said for the fact that people have really gotten behind SOA. Vendors, think tanks, standards groups, public and private sector organizations have really taken up the SOA banner and run with it. There have been plenty of good ideas in the past, but without a critical mass, they are doomed for the history books (err… blogs).
• Internet – The Internet has changed the face of computing, business, and social interaction. SOA is inherently network-aware and able to take advantage of standards-based distributed computing frameworks.

Finally, a colleague passed along a great post from IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley that describes several aspects regarding how SOA is different from previous approaches: What is Different about SOA than previous approaches?