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).
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