The First Annual International SOA Symposium was dubbed by its organizers as "the world's largest and most comprehensive SOA event for practitioners, providing a combination of expert speakers from around the world and a series of SOA training and certification workshops."
The conference, which took place in October 7-8 in Amsterdam, featured about 70 presentations in eleven tracks. Many of the speakers are accomplished book authors in the field representing 22 books already published or as many as 40 if we count the titles under development.
The event was a first, celebrating the coming of age of service orientation and two associated helper technologies, virtualization and distributed computing grids. It is not an overstatement to assert that service orientation has become the new established paradigm by which enterprise applications are to be delivered. Much in the same way that virtualization brought enormous operational flexibility by allowing the decoupling of application instances (virtual machines) from the hardware on which they run, service orientation allows the decoupling of an enterprise function, such as supply chain to be made up of fungible service components.
The mainstreaming of the trio of technologies is borne by their presence in all top five of the InformationWeek 500 Top Innovators in Business Technology for 2008. The top five are
National Semiconductor with an SOA-based multi-partner supply chain system,
Hilton Hotels with a system allowing customers to book individual rooms using grid computing,
Highmark Health for adopting a comprehensive strategy for energy conservation in IT that includes virtualization
Fiserv, for the development a Web 2.0 Facebook application for the company's banking customers that lets users do basic banking tasks such as paying bills, making transfers and checking balances
Unum, a provider of health insurance packages to employers, for integrating more than 300 service operations using SOA; price quotes for new packages, which used to take as long as eight weeks, now are done in less than a week.
One dimension of flexibility is that service components may comprise existing applications that have been service-enabled through middleware, or can be service components from the ground up. Under this paradigm, enterprise applications are built from in-sourced components (i.e., corporate-owned data centers) as well as out-sourced components, such as cloud resources. Interoperability is a given. System architects have the mandate to pick the most economical alternative that meets corporate requirements based on the service components' SLAs.
At this conference, I had the privilege of delivering two presentations, Virtual Service Oriented Grids: A Prescription for Scalable SOA and Scaling the Delivery of IT Services to Consumer Space with SOA based on ideas in the book I co-authored with Jackson He, Mark Chang and Parviz Peiravi. This New Book from Intel Press is due from the printer at the end of October.
In the book we predict the emergence of a cottage industry around SOA. This process seems to be at play at the conference: the main organizer for the event is a comparatively pure play SOA consulting house in the Netherlands called Ordina. It was interesting to see the big companiess like IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle and my employer, Intel playing supporting role to a number of small companies. This dynamic reflects the increasing value that the role of integration has as a fraction of the value of an enterprise solution. This is not to say that the big players are soon to become irrelevant. They had prominent roles as presenters, in panels and keynote speakers.
The implications of interoperability and open participation aspects of SOA are potentially momentous. No two-billion dollar fabs are needed to as a ticket to entry. Any small team can band together with an idea and start an SOA company. The only requirements are brains and dedication. The potential for technology leapfrogging in emerging economies cannot be understated. Startups in these countries need not start from zero; re-using components already available from more advanced economies can quickly bootstrap SOA adoption.
I was having lunch the last day when the conference Chairman, Art Ligthart approached me asking if I'd be interested in participating in the panel What is the Value of Service Grids? that afternoon. Other participants would be David Chappell from Oracle and Jim Webber from Thoughtworks, hosted by Herbjörn Wilhelmsen, from Objectware. Mr. Chappell is well known I the industry as the creator of the concept of ESB or enterprise service bus, a central concept to SOA deployments. He presented grids as a software abstraction. I observed that for grids to deliver their design performance it is essential that architects pay attention to the underlying enterprise infrastructure that includes processors and considerations of memory and network latency and bandwidth as well as locality.
If you are interested in the foil sets, I'll be happy to mail you a copy. Please send me a short note to enrique.g.castro-leon at intel.com. If you can't access them for some reason, I'll be happy to mail you a copy. Some ideas in the book are featured in an article in SOA Magazine, issue XXII, Sept 2008.
. We'll cover this one specifically in another blog.
