It seems that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to be this year's hot buzzword, rather than a well-defined, meaningful and valuable part of the Enterprise Architecture landscape. Before the term fades away completely, perhaps we should agree what's valuable about the move to SOA and how to make the leap, and make the leap valuable. OMG's SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts; and the OMG itself is making headway on modeling standards for services (as opposed to yet another set of standards for moving bits around wires).

What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? What is BPMN, and why should I care? Which of these are primarily designed to help IT at a technical level, and which help an organization at a business level? Amongst the flurry of BPM and Web services standards that appear to overlap at times, there is a central core of important ones. This session, led by Keith Swenson, Fujitsu's Chief Architect and Co-Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition Technical Committee (WfMC), is aimed at lending clarity to the fuzzy world of BPM and Web services standards and at explaining the benefits of investing in standards-driven solutions.

Late Thursday Yahoo released the text of the letter it sent to Carl Icahn telling him he's misguided and that the current Yahoo board knows better what good for the company. It repeats what Yahoo has said before - that it is willing to sell for the right price, which lately has been $37 a share. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Google are reportedly still talking.

This session will investigate what is happening out there in the world of Mobility that uses Services, some are calling this MOA (Mobile Oriented Architecture). We will also discuss architectures, application design & considerations for mobility

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Adoption of federated identity technology has been slower than the hype might indicate, despite the maturity of standards such as SAML 2.0 and Web Services Security. This presentation examines the distinct business and technical identity management issues in both the commercial and user-centric spheres, and important catalysts to drive successful deployment.

In this wide-ranging interview with SYS-CON.com David Linthicum, CEO of StrikeIron, addresses the hot new Data Services trend and the all-important notion of enterprise mashups, which he pinpoints as the defining technology of the year ahead. 'I'm surprised people are paying me for this work, I'm having a blast,' quips Linthicum.

'Data services apply the same philosophy of reuse and flexibility that SOA offers, but to the data tier,' explains John Goodson, executive leader of DataDirect Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A in the run-up to the inuaugural DataServices World on June 24th in New York City, of which Data Direct is the Diamond Sponsor. 'Data services,' Goodson continues, 'provide a level of abstraction that frees developers from concerning themselves with the physical location or format of the underlying data.'

Even though 'Service' comes first in SCA (Service Component Architecture), SCA is a distributed component model. It's about designing components (and composites) rather than designing services. It doesn't feel like it was designed to build a SOA. It feels like its main goal was to define a distributed component model. And as we all know, the distributed component models failed in the past. I think SCA will too.

Many organizations make the faulty assumption that SOA is a panacea that can, and should be, applied to every situation. The reality is that service orientation is not the right answer for every scenario. The expense of service orientation cannot always be recouped and, in some cases, service orientation can actually do more harm than good. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of selective service orientation and how to go about effectively governing the service orientation of the enterprise.

One aspect of the debate over software productivity and assembly is whether or not visual tools can help. I think that they do - visual abstractions can be very meaningful - but I do not know of any visual system that actually solves the complete problem (i.e none have solved the customization/round trip problem). UML tools are furthermore too object oriented for some applications - such as services and REST.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments, with a focus on ESB, and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing Solutions Group, responsible for the bulk of the company's revenues.

Adopting SOA is a lot like gardening. It takes time, skill, a lot of hard work, and the process can be messy and even a bit frustrating at times. I know you've probably heard tons of different analogies that attempt to put SOA and governance into everyday terms and I'm sure that growing the SOA 'garden' through governance won?t be the last.

Once upon a time data modeling played a central role in the process of developing applications. Thus far in the SOA era, there has been a heavy emphasis on process, and data has all-too-often been lost in the SOA shuffle. In this talk, we present a data model for SOA - i.e., a service-oriented data model. This model formalizes the notion of a data service, modeling data in SOA as a layer of interrelated data services. We explain the key components of this model, including a taxonomy of data service operation types, a mechanism for capturing the entities that the data services are 'about', and an approach to modeling relationships in SOA. The content of this talk is based on the data services model embodied in the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP), and the approach is based on lessons learned over a period of several years of working with data services and customer use cases.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.

HP CEO Mark Hurd has finally done something that Wall Street doesn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion cash - a venture that some people think is poor use of money better spent elsewhere.

While EDI transactions account for most worldwide commercial activity, XML-based alternatives are beginning to gain traction. According to Forrester Research, stateful XML, stateless XML, and even flat file exchanges are all projected to grow at a faster rate than EDI over the next few years. The firm predicts stateful XML transactions will be required for a growing number of B2B process-oriented transactions and are projected to exceed the growth of EDI transactions over the next five years.

Interoperability is the ability of two or more systems to work with each other. In the loosely coupled environment of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), separate resources don't have to know how each of them work, but they do need to interoperate with each other by having enough common ground to exchange messages without error or misunderstanding.

SOA is about people as much as technology. This talk will demonstrate how adding a layer of social (or 'Web 2.0') features - things like tags, comments and syndication feeds - to your SOA infrastructure can provide fertile ground to help grow a vibrant and connected community of developers, businesspeople and technologists. We'll show you how a social registry/repository can enable both grass-roots development and CIO-pleasing governance, all with standard REST interfaces. And because we can directly connect SOA components and metadata with the human community creating them, the relationships of both the software and the people can be enriched.

Managing Web Services in production is no easy task. Ensuring that services follow corporate security and SOA governance requirements, monitoring compliance with individual SLAs, preventing one client from degrading the performance of others and ensuring services built today will work in the future are a few of the challenges. Web service virtualization provides a separate layer that isolates business and operational rules, enabling you to quickly configure virtual Web services while enforcing business and operational policies. This services layer augments Web services management (WSM) tools and registries, making all the services in the enterprise more efficient and consistent.

TIBCO announced that mobilkom austria group (mag) set a new benchmark for the mobile phone sector, establishing mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) covering Serbia and Macedonia in just six months using an enterprise service bus based on TIBCO software. The previously unheard-of timescales were made possible through the use of standardized functionality from back-office mag billing and CRM systems, located in different parts of Europe, that were reused for the new MVNOs.

Development of service-oriented environments is an evolutionary process for organizations of all sizes. The architecture and design decisions made by system architects and developers will impact manageability and flexibility of service infrastructures. Efficient management of loosely-coupled services requires implementing practices to enable visibility, flexibility and automation of service operations. Questions to be answered in this session: What architectures are common for service deployment and integration? How can services be built for manageablility? Why is operational visibility essential for SOA management? How does SOA Management fit into SOA Governance?

Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Carl Icahn - the greatest stockholder activist of our generation - is going to pull the pin to try to force Yahoo into negotiating a deal with Microsoft. It's unclear whether Yahoo's two biggest shareholders Capital Research & Management and Legg Maison Capital Management will support Icahn.

SOA is mostly associated with technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

As Service-Oriented Architectures gain ground, it becomes obvious that their performance is the key to their success. I'm going to briefly write about two sessions that I attended in JavaOne 2008. They outline two totally different approaches from two very different companies. You're going to see that a well performing SOA implementation requires considerable work and performance tuning expertise.

Back in the 90s I was on a big project to standardize enterprise software. We wrote a few papers about it, and a chapter in a book. We often used the 'Henry Ford' analogy, which relates to the impact standards for interchangeable parts had on hard goods manufacturing. The Henry Ford analogy says that the hard job in mass assembly is getting the interchangeable parts standardized - thereafter creating the moving assembly line is the easy job.

I've worked for Fortune 500 companies engaged simultaneously in 50+ of IT projects as well as small companies with one or two products and I don't believe there is a need for any organization to have a full-time software architect. Once the modeling is done, it is the work of coding and testing that truly takes the full-time effort. Once underway, 100 hours a month of time is enough for any architect to respond to most needs of all ongoing projects.

Service orientation is one of the most popular trends of these recent years, but there are not any metrics on it. Hence you can not consume SOA in a project with a specific measuring. On the other side, Unified Process (especially RUP) has powerful abilities on such developments. In our discussion Chris Shayan is going to demonstrate that we can combine SOA and RUP with each other and finally make a Service Oriented Unified Process.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can deliver tremendous value in flexibility, adaptability and cost savings. But SOA environments are complex by definition, with lots of loosely coupled components and a potentially vast combination of platforms, software, databases, applications and networks. One of the biggest challenges inherent in realizing the benefits of SOA is effectively managing all of these diverse components to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications running in them to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This session will explore Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines and offer practical insights into how CEP can be leveraged to enable rapid real-time problem correction and predictive problem prevention that is vital to successful SOA implementations.

This session will illustrate how service-orientation brings about the ability for organizations to see changes in business processes reflected quickly in their business systems by discussing real-world applications of SOA as applied to supply-chain management.

Dramatic industry changes - including vendor consolidation, outsourcing and the growth of open source - highlight the need for a better way. When a SOA implementation costs too much, the culprit is often the old-fashioned, proprietary and expensive server or hub-based middleware. A better, distributed approach to SOA infrastructure can help reduce cost and increase the benefit of SOA implementation. This presentation includes an overview of the industry trends driving us toward SOA and explains why traditional middleware systems do not meet modern requirements as well as a distributed approach to SOA infrastructure.

The success of SOA runs two ways. SOA serves as the catalyst for organizational change, yet an organization must be ready to embrace these new dimensions opened up by SOA. The latest survey data shows most organizations are just starting on their SOA journeys. Why do enterprises set out to build a Service Oriented Architecture, but end up with a 'Service Averse Architecture'? There are many promises being made about the potential of SOA these days, followed by disillusionment as these promises don't pan out. However, SOA is more than a single IT project or even a series of implementations. Rather, SOA represents a long-term change in thinking and management of all aspects of the enterprise. SOA not only decomposes technology into loosely coupled systems, but also decomposes organizations into 'loosely coupled businesses.' This session will look at the latest survey data on ways organizations are embracing service oriented architecture, and how far along the road most are from full-functioning SOA.

Exploring the boundaries between the Enterprise and the Internet, this talk focuses on Architectural approaches from the service pattern, process pattern and event pattern to help SOA practitioners understand topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, SaaS, Social Networks and how they connect with the Enterprise. The emerging patterns of architecture can enable the savvy architect to empower their IT to embrace an accelerating vision of the network economy.

SOA implementations are increasingly reliant on streams of data that are time-critical, reliably delivered and sourced from mixed infrastructures in a highly distributed environment. Data formats, delivery mechanisms, fault tolerance capabilities and stateful semantics embedded in data are often inadequately considered when architecting and implementing large scale real-time SOA applications. This talk will introduce several real-time data-centric technologies that specifically address the challenges of wide-scale, real-time data distribution, as well as how these technologies seamlessly integrate into existing SOA frameworks. Examples will be drawn from military and aerospace applications that are already seeing success with real-time, highly distributed SOA applications.

The new wave of Web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, which enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data. Technologies such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services simplify the job of developers. The ADO.NET Entity Framework raises the level of abstraction for data programming. It is the evolution of ADO.NET that allows developers to program in terms of the standard ADO.NET abstraction or in terms of persistent objects (ORM) and is built upon the standard ADO.NET Provider model. The Entity Framework introduces a set of services around the Entity Data Model (EDM) (a medium for defining domain models for an application).

URIs are the lingua franca of the Web. They are in every Web page and every HTTP request. In a practical sense, they represent the realization of the Web. Without them, the Web would cease to exist. The situation is very different in the world of the RDBMS. Here, URIs are interlopers. Some RDBMS have provided basic support for URIs via their object extension facilities; however, URIs are still not considered a formal part of RDBMS schema design. This talk explores how URI could evolve to become as important to RDBMS Schemas as it is to the Web.

As SOA rapidly becomes the standard for enterprise architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before. Due to the vital role that data plays both in business and systems operations, database architectures, information specialists, data integration experts, and anyone responsible for data persistence in an organization are increasingly being called upon to contribute to their organization's SOA initiatives - whether or not this was intended at the onset. In this presentation, we will review the technologies, best practices, and patterns that are shaping the way we utilize enterprise data.

The ever-increasing movement towards implementing complex SOA-based applications has triggered a direct attention of leading industry researchers and practitioners to the subject of layering in such applications, in general, and the relationship between the fields of database engineering and SOA, in particular. Common notion of interoperability, loose-coupling between consumers and providers, and complexity-hiding, and demands for enabling extensive reuse of application services to address unforeseen business requirements for new user types, for new types of information and for new composite views has brought to the forefront the concept of Data Services Layer (DSL) as a distinct architectural layer. DSL is an essential part of an application architecture that combines data access functions and corresponding database structures and promises ensuring the next harvest for SOA ROI.

SAP announced a design and development governance offering for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA.) The new offering will enable SAP customers to experience tangible business benefits as a result of an enterprise SOA strategy. Growing adoption of the SAP enterprise SOA strategy -- the design and reuse of rich enterprise services to enable efficiencies in business performance -- has led to customer requests for training and education involving SAP's proven design and development governance methodologies to help them speed their path toward enterprise SOA.