SCHEDULE: FOCUSED SESSIONS

This session will discuss the current status of SOA-related standards and their applicability. This has been an active area over the last few years with multiple standards being developed and supported by different organizations. However there are still concerns about the complexity and maturity of SOA standards. The content will be based on Bob's recommendations for government agencies in the US and Asia. It will also include information from an "Emerging Standards for SOA" Session that Bob organized bringing together leading standards groups.

Designing SOA has been and still is a challenging task. SOA is about designing business services and composing those services into end-to-end applications that support business processes. SOA approach promotes loose coupling, reusability, coarse-grained interfaces, and several other concept. This session will demonstrate, how to use these and more advanced concepts in practice. How to develop a business services? What is the right granulation? How many operations a business service should have? What is a service and what a process? How to decouple types? How to define service layers? These and other questions will be answered in this session, where we will show on examples the good practices - patterns, and the bad practices - anti-patterns of SOA design.

As enterprises move into developing SOAs for their internal infrastructure, data services have become a critical component of that architecture. Essentially data services allows one to take relational and other data and make them available as services. This not only enables easy integration of data into business processes but also for mashups and any service in general. Exposing enterprise data as Web services is however not a simple task. These services need to be well secured, highly reliable, and highly scalable with the ability to handle failures transparently. One of the challenges is to make data services consumable by many applications and hence having many integration options as well. At the same time the data that need be exposed could be in the form of relational data, CSV files, Excel spreadsheet files and so on.

For the enterprise another important factor for data service solutions is that it needs to be very database developer friendly. Database architects, developers and administrators who know best how to handle enterprise data and work very closely with that data, need to be geared with an easy mechanism to expose the data as services. This ensured highly flexible integration for enterprise wide SOA. In this talk Sumedha Rubasinghe will discuss the challenges and also introduce WSO2 Data Services which can be used to meet these challenges and help bring various data sources into the center of your enterprise SOA strategy.

Enterprises, ISVs and SMBs are rapidly adopting virtualisation technology. Virtual lab automation (VLA) has emerged as an innovative solution for streamlining software development and automating the entire development and test environment setup while utilizing existing server virtualisation infrastructure. VLA transforms your lab into a strategic asset while accelerating your test and development cycles to get better products to market quicker.

This presentation will provide an overview of VLA driving your test and development infrastructure and provide best practice recommendations for how VLA can add significant value to developers, testers and IT operations staff and help drive business growth and employee productivity. VLA can be effectively leveraged with leading hypervisors such as those from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware and leading software engineering tools such as IBM Rational Build Forge, IBM Rational ClearQuest and HP Quality Center. The presentation will also provide an insight into using virtualisation across the software operational cycle -in the lab, staging/pre-production and production data center.

Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine represent the leading edge of a wave of cloud services. These services and similar services that are being developed by other vendors are increasing efficiencies in web application development, hosting and data storage. These services provide the ability to expand computing and hosting capability as a variable cost rather than a fixed cost. The ability to design infrastructure that dynamically adapts to peak loads positively affects the stability and resilience because infrastructure no longer experiences service outages during peak loads. It can flexibly extended via cloud services. What are the business areas that can benefit most from using cloud services? How can enterprise business standards be met with seemingly unreliable services? Take two of the most prominent services as category examples. What does Amazon Web Services offer specifically and what does Google App Engine offer and how are they similar and different? How do we evaluate these and future offerings to come? This talk addresses key issues surrounding the leveraged use of cloud services for business applications in the enterprise and identifies where the usage differs from the usage of these services in Web 2.0 applications. We use Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine as examples only. This is not a vendor presentation also it is not biased to one vendor - rather it is meant to teach the audience how to evaluate these offerings for their own needs and what checklists might one find useful. We use AWS and GAE as examples as these are the most well known - we also survey the other offerings available so that the audience can get an idea of what is out there and what is coming. This talk is meant for technologists as well as business users.

Using BPEL for complex real-world business processes requires that different advanced techniques are used. Two very important aspects of business process modelling are fault handling and event handling. Particularly in business processes that span multiple enterprises and use web services over the Internet, we can assume that faults will occur quite often due to various reasons, including broken connections, unreachable web services, unavailability of services, and so on. Sometimes the process has to wait for a message event or an alarm event to occur. The session will present several advanced BPEL features which deal with these and other issues necessary to implement complex and robust business processes.

One of the challenges of SOA is the development of services, which are reusable. Such services can participate in several different processes and orchestrations. Experienced architects are aware that designing and implementing reusable services is much harder task than implementing services for single use. In this session we will discuss best practices for designing reusable service interfaces. We will discuss the possibilities provided by WSDL. We will address the versioning issue, which becomes crucial when changing/modifying services in order to make them more reusable.

This session will discuss recommended service oriented architectures based on Use Cases. For example, there are different architectural requirements for Intranet, Extranet, and Internet SOA scenarios. The content will be based on Bob's work with US government agencies at the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC).

Right now SOA is so heavily embedded in BPM that I would be hard pressed to find any of our customers who don't use it in their BPM deployment. I have often said that SOA is the enabling infrastructure of BPM and BPM is the killer app for SOA. But what comes after SOA? Office 2.0 companies are using a number of tools to integrate SaaS applications that have nothing to do with SOA, such as REST, HTTP Binding, JSON, XML, Atom, and iCal. The benefits of using these technologies builds a compelling case for making the shift, but we need to be aware of the possible pitfalls as well. Come join the conversation and help shape BPM for life after SOA.

With SOA and SaaS, Solution architectures have undergone two significant paradigm shifts in the past few years. One is the notion of breaking down a solution into coarse grained services pushed by SOA, and the other is to deliver software as a managed service, pushed by SaaS. With SaaS gaining mainstream recognition, amplified by the advent of virtualization platforms and web based computing options, the enterprise infrastructure is rapidly morphing into a large computing blurb- a 'computing cloud'.

The cloud spans dedicated servers, virtualized platforms, web based hosting, solutions in SaaS model, solutions built on PaaS, and much of these. All ready for user interactions in a Web2.0 model, and integration using the SOA backbone. This brings forth new possibilities for solution architectures, infrastructure, tools, and deployment considerations for business applications/products. SaaS/PaaS And SOA fits in rather snugly as a primary integration fabric. Largely driven by the location transparency, SOA ties in all the applications both within the enterprise network and beyond.

In this session we will discuss some of these trends in the virtualization space in the context of SOA. The outline: State of SOA, Enter SaaS, PaaS adding a new dimension, Virtualization- abstracting the hardware and operating layer, Where do they all meet?, The resulting computing cloud, The user interaction layer - Web2.0, The integration fabric- SOA, The backends- SaaS & PaaS, The synergies, Emerging enterprise architecture models, What to expect in 2009.

As traditional monolithic "silo-oriented" architectures get increasingly replaced by SOA, assuring the performance of the system becomes a daunting challenge. Incorrect design choices regarding service granularity, service composition, service invocation, service distribution and service virtualization may either lead to disastrous performance or coming up with an architecture that does not yield the benefits of an SOA. In this session we discuss the challenges that need consideration during each step of the design. Practical tips to get around some of the tricky issues (like assuring low latency) are presented. Pitfalls of the common design flaws and how they impact SOA performance are discussed. Some of the best practices for load balancing, low latency, high throughput, service composition, performance testing and change management are also discussed and a real life example that uses each of the best practice to solve a business problem is presented.

Since 2005 the Web 2.0 global phenomenon has created and enabled over 100 million individual users to be generators of content. In the first response to this deluge of data the data management principles applied were conventional database technologies. Normalized schemas were used in a naive fashion only because we did not know better. Since 2005 many technologies and techniques such as memcache and systematic denormalization have emerged but these too are the trailing edge of an old wave. Enterprise data management technologies have been strongly impacted by Web 2.0 data for every company that has a customer facing web presence. The emerging technologies from agile data warehousing, to analytic databases and edge analytics all coalesce around the need to rapidly analyze massive amounts of data and to respond in near-real-time via multiple channels. A consensus is emerging in mid 2008 about the need for a term to capture this - the term is Data 2.0 and was first used by the author in a similar context in 2005. Use cases such as fraud detection, dynamic ecommerce pricing and customized advertising amongst many others all involve data management techniques that come from the Data 2.0 world. Whether you are a technologist, businessperson, vendor or end-user Data 2.0 needs to be part of your knowledge toolkit post 2008. This is the first time this presentation is being given outside the US. As the person who originated the term, the author is ideally placed to bring this approach to Asia Pacific and Europe.

This session will discuss requirements and best practices for enterprise SOA Deployment. The session will be based on Bob's experience working with large enterprises such as General Motors and Boeing. It will also include recommendations from a Session on "SOA Deployment: Industry Best Practices" that Bob has organized for several US government agencies.

Traditional testing approaches, which have been used through the years, are often used also for service-oriented systems. However, due to the dynamic and adaptive nature of SOA most testing techniques are not directly applicable to SOA testing. The session will focus on the process of testing SOA based systems, especially on business process testing, testing of service interfaces, services, integration testing and testing of SOA as a whole. In this vendor-agnostic presentation, the main challenges in SOA testing will be discussed and techniques to overcome them will be presented.

TBD

On-demand computing has transformed software, lowering risk and cost while increasing user adoption and customer success. To be successful, an application must be designed for on-demand from the ground-up, including core architectural elements such as multi-tenancy, availability, performance, security, metadata-driven customization, integration via web services, etc. A comprehensive platform should encapsulate core computing services, allowing application developers to focus on innovation and value. Using demos and code examples, Peter Coffee will discuss the technical architecture and developer benefits of a multi-tenant language and a comprehensive cloud-based development experience.

eMail is arguably the most important business application that any organization runs, yet bringing control to the email flood, remaining compliant with increasingly unforgiving regulations and making sense of divergent technology solutions to tame the email beast is a near impossible undertaking. Drawing upon current independent and global research, this session will share best and worst practices along with a no holds barred examination and evaluation of the current archiving and management technologies in the marketplace. All organizations have to manage and archive emails, but doing it efficiently and with the right tools currently eludes many.

Many organizations work on a global scale and organizations need to ensure that products, service and communication are localized and translated for all of the different audiences within these regions. At the same time organizations need to control message and brand consistency to follow a consistent corporate strategy. Corporate and local marketing and communication departments need to react to market trends, launch new products and roll out integrated campaigns on a daily basis. This need to balance the needs of regional and international means that organizations need a solid Web site globalization strategy that includes and extends beyond translating content.

Hans de Groot will talk about how Web site globalization entails deploying multiple Web sites across the globe and show how organizations with an effective globalization strategy meet the localization requirements for different cultures, languages and markets while maintaining central control over brand and messaging.

Services Oriented Architecture has moved beyond the hype cycle and though maybe not what its inventors envisage - is nonetheless an important element of the IT strategy and execution with many large organizations today. Where does ECM fit into this? How do ECM vendors fit into this picture?

Almost all the major ECM vendors talk about their SOA architectures and their Web Services approach - but beware much of it may be little more than marketing. ECM has a powerful role to play in SOA and the future of SOA, but its role is still nascent and being formed. In this session we will discuss SOA, ECM - the challenges, opportunities, weaknesses and benefits. We will share with you examples from existing organizations of ECM/SOA success and some where little or no progress has been made, despite strong efforts.

SOA can help companies solving immediate business problems such as connecting to business partners, accessing legacy applications, and integrating across technology boundaries. However at a more strategic level, SOA is about creating an IT environment to support continuous business optimization. SOA can better align IT with business, but at the same time can stimulate business to start thinking about business processes and optimizing them. In this session we will show how enterprises can use BPM together with SOA to become more flexible, more agile, more competitive, and to gradually transform into process-driven enterprise. We will also discuss the changing role of IT, which can (and should) become the innovator and the driver of changes.

This talk attempts to emphasize "Service Orientation" principles and patterns. It will bring out the significance associated with real life experiences of "Processes", which will in turn reinforce SOA practices by taking them through various service lifecycle stages of "Strategy" to "Operations" followed by a cycle of "Continuous Improvement". Gautam will provide a structure to the Service Orientation Elements forming a "Service Orientation Triad" of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) and Service Oriented Processes (SOP). Significance of "processes" to promote and cultivate a service oriented culture will be highlighted. The talk also recommends how the processes need to be engineered on a two dimensional scale in order to leverage and optimally manage SOA, SOI as well as IT Services. In addition to the prescribed process architecture, this talk also discusses how real life experiences (based on ITIL best practices) such as - service strategy, demand management, configuration management systems, service portfolio & catalog and service level management - have been proved to promote a SOA culture in organizations.

Given the high degree of competitiveness and the reduced time lines available to respond to dynamic business needs, organizations have little option, but to embrace as many productivity enhancement tools as necessary to stay ahead & optimally manage their business. Invariably this results in a farm of tools which either are loosely connected or are completely isolated, introducing a level of management complexity which negates the value these tools offers in isolation.

Traditionally organizations adopted data integration and warehousing infrastructure to break the barrier imposed by these point solutions, but with organizations recognizing the benefits of OnDemand solution or software delivered as a service (SaaS), complexity associated with integrating these has increased by several folds. In this session we could look at how organizations can leverage some of the standard architecture (like SOA) and standards (BPEL/BPMN, REST) to not only address the integration constraints, but also enable integration solution providers to offer these integration as a service. In this session, Venki will also discuss about the advantages organizations get by developing these integration solutions using a comprehensive business process platform that adheres to the standards.

Increase your virtualization IQ: learn about Microsoft's virtualization roadmap, understand the technologies and get ready for the Virtualization. This session will provide you with an overview of Microsoft's comprehensive virtualization strategy and product offerings, including server virtualization and management (Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008), Microsoft Application Virtualization, presentation virtualization (Terminal Services) and desktop virtualization (Virtual PC 2007, App-V).

We are experiencing a paradigm shift in ECM. User experiences and expectations are changing and increasing. Technology is reaching out to a wider audience in a variety of ways and creating newer possibilities for what people could do with information. Statutory compliance, security of information and protecting corporate and personal assets is becoming increasingly important. In this context, ECM vendors are faced with game changing opportunities and challenges. Putting all these together is not entirely disruptive, neither incremental evolutions over status quo is best for cost effective and timely solutions. This requires a solid architectural approach to the ECM platform and the glue to connect the business needs with a rich set of applications.