Well, I have officially had my 15 minutes of fame.  Back in June, I was invited to participate in a SOA Power Panel for SYS-CON in New York.  I’ve participated in a number of expert panels over the years, but this one was unique.  The discussion took place in the Reuter’s TV studio in Times Square.  The room had a professional camera crew, a sound stage, CNN-style set, and the windows behind the panel overlook Times Square (you can actually see some of the digital billboards in the background).  It was a fantastic experience and we had a really great discussion around the current state of Service Orientation and the future holds for enterprises both large and small with respect to technology innovation and successful SOA adoption.

You can find the videocast here: SOA Power Panel - Live from Times Square. There is a brief commercial and then it takes you right into the panel discussion.

I had a ton of fun participating in it and hopefully you’ll find value in viewing it.

Immediately after the conference last month, I got caught up in vacation and then working with a couple of new clients.  I’m back in the saddle now, and wanted to share some of my experiences.

The SOAWorld conference was very well attended, including the co-located events: Virtualization World and Data Services World.  I was a bit suprised to see that so many of the presenters were vendors rather than customers or practioners.  If this had been my first SOA conference, this would be a red flag for me that SOA is still just a lot of hype.  As it was, I just found it rather odd and a little more of an empty experience than I have come to expect.  Otherwise, the conference was great and it was quite encouraging to see so much energy around things like SOA and Virtualization in spite of the state of the economy.  This gives me great confidence and reinforces a belief that I have held for some time now, which is that SOA and Virtualization make good economic sense.

My portions of the conference went fairly well.  On Monday, June 23rd, I delivered: “A Composable Service is a Good Service”.  The room was packed and that presentation was extremely well received.  The audience was very engaging, shared some of their own war stories and asked for insight on particular service design dilemas that they have been dealing with.  On Tuesday, SYS-CON staff contacted me and asked if I would be willing to step in for a speaker that would not be able to attend.  I accepted, and delivered: “A Little SOA Goes a Long Way” (my SOAWorld presentation from last November).  I also had the pleasure to participate in two expert panels, one of which was held in the Reuters studio in Time Square.  When one or more of those videos become available, I’ll be sure to provide a link.

Presentation deck downloads: “A Composable Service is a Good Service” (PDF)  and “A Little SOA Goes a Long Way” (PDF)

One final comment about the conference is that there was quite a bit of buzz about virtualization as well as “cloud computing”.  I’ve paid a little bit of attention to the virtualization movement, but thus far I have completly ignored cloud computing.  None of my clients are talking about it, and it may all be vaporware (let the cloud-related puns ensue), but it has sparked my curiosity all the same.

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).