SCHEDULE: VENDOR-AGNOSTIC VOICES

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a technical phenomenon. It can bring business advantage if it is used in the right way. But technologists are not very good at predicting financial return, and SOA can be expensive. How do you know whether it will be a wise investment?

This presentation will help you answer that question. It addresses SOA development from the executive's perspective, describes what the executive should expect from the architecture team, and discusses how to communicate with that team to obtain a service-oriented architecture that maximises ROI for the enterprise.

Understanding the market can be as complex as choosing and using the right product. In this session, we will take a look at what the enterprise content management market really means, from the perspective of vendors, consultants, and buyers: Where is the market now? And we will have an educated guess at where it may be in five or ten year's time.

If we are to believe many of the industry analysts and journalists, the market will soon belong to just a handful of major vendors (EMC, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft for example). Yet in fact, there is a much more vibrant and dynamic market than most people imagine, one made up of a multitude of players and technology options.

In fact, now the options are broader than ever and include SaaS, open source, regional and industry specific tools along with challengers from the likes of Google and Salesforce.com . Often developers and providers of solutions are as just as confused as buyers over the best ways of meeting users' needs!

This session provides some future watching beyond the next calendar year. It will show that this industry is in its infancy, and that huge changes and challenges still lie ahead. Hopefully, the session will offer some guidance on how to make sense of and navigate the options that face you.

Enterprise IT leaders face many expectations that pull them in opposite directions. Scarce resources require them to do more with less, but global competition requires more rapid innovation. Rapid development of mobile and broadband systems creates demand to make more data available to more users, but standards are continually rising for strict information security and business process governance. Visionary IT leaders will achieve economies of scale, and get more leverage from specialized skills, by taking full advantage of the growing capabilities of software as a service—and the breakthrough potentials of the general-purpose application platform as a service. This session will illuminate the reasons why service models represent "the new normal" for future IT systems.