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 8.00 am

Registration

8.30 – 9.45 am

Keynote Address (All)

Architecting SOA Applications for Business Agility 

Service Oriented Architecture is offering new challenges for today's IT Architects.  While the business flexibility that SOA offers is paradigm-shifting, the journey getting there is demanding. Businesses need the ability to launch new and innovative products and services in a timely manner.  They are requiring agility and responsiveness to change, to stay ahead of the competition, or just survive. Traditional architecture approaches have been too costly and inflexible. Business and integration logic is fragmented and spread across multiple systems. The end result is that IT’s ability to support new product offerings often requires multiple system changes, lengthy testing and user acceptance testing, which is very costly and time consuming.

There are many items that comprise a SOA Applications such as business processes, business services, atomic services, industry standards, business policies, ontological models, etc.  We will be looking at architectural requirements and considerations necessary for creating SOA Applications.  In addition, various use cases will be presented showing how companies have solved these challenges through SOA Applications. 

Ron Todd
World Wide Solutions Architect,
IBM Software Group

10.00 – 10.50

Choice of three breakout sessions

Breakout 1

A RESTful project approach

Construction of significant systems to be used by millions of people and involving billions of dollars is what software engineering is about. REST architectures are an enabler for software process industrialisation, making possible routine delivery of mega-scale systems to be used by a global audience. This talk looks at the specifics of scaling with REST.

Phil Haynes
Principal Consultant

Breakout 2

Consumerisation in IT

Enterprise architects and CIOs of large companies are increasingly contemplating  using "public" service infrastructures as part of their overall IT capabilities (this is sometime referred to as consumerisation of IT).  They are not necessarily interested in booting all enterprise software out, but rather implementing hybrid architectures where some aspects of IT are managed internally and some others are sourced from the cloud and/or where a subset of their user population has access to a consumer grade version of a service (e.g. Hotmail) whereas another set of the population has access to a enterprise grade version of that service (e.g. Microsoft Exchange). In this breakout we will be address the motivations, pros and cons of such an approach, along the way positioning SOA as an enabling technology for this evolution.

Gianpaolo Carraro
Director,
Architecture Strategy

Breakout 3

Clarity in the Cloud: Busting Myths About SaaS

Cloudy metaphors are widely applied to service-model systems for delivering a wide range of IT functions and resources. Fundamental trends, both in core technology and in the context of IT economics and governance, make “cloud computing” more a mandate than a fad – but enterprise IT managers and entrepreneurial developers alike will do well to arm themselves against vague and confusing hype. This session offers precision guidance into the complex but promising world of the cloud.

Peter Coffee
Director of Platform Intelligence,
Salesforce.com

 10.50 – 11.00

 Morning Tea 

 11.10 – 12.00

 Choose to attend one Round Table

Round Table 1

REST vs SOAP

While SOA is becoming more widely adopted, if not understood, it seems to be synonymous with using Web Services implemented using SOAP. While this has some good features and is the result of a lot of work by a number of major vendors over many years there is also the REST model which is a very different approach. We will discuss how REST and SOAP compare and where they are the same and look to see where each should be used and why. The real question is not REST vs SOAP but how to make SOA effective.

Brett McDowall
Chief Architect

Round Table 2

Preparing for the cloud

An effective SOA strategy acknowledges and embraces change in both the organisational and technology environments.  One very clear trend in the industry is for increasing amounts of business capability to be offered as a service ‘in the cloud’, leading to hybrid models spanning both sides of the firewall.  This roundtable explores some of the factors that organisations might consider while deciding how they adopt these offerings, and how this relates to the SOA architectural decisions they make today.  Along the way, we’ll talk about some of the technologies that will become increasingly relevant to this space.

David Lemphers
Platform Evangelists,
Microsoft Dynamics Technologies

Round Table 3

Your SOA implementation is now a teenager and out of control

Circa 2002 and the SOA buzzword is making rounds in the IT industry. Nobody knows if it has legs or its a passing fad. Its 6 years later and we've generally come to the conclusion that high level decoupling is good regardless of what we decide to call it. You have a fair number of SOA implementations or are thinking of getting the architectural style into the mix and are wondering about what governance you need in place to manage this beast. Issues of versioning, deployment, domain ownership, growth strategy, corporate politics are front and center stage. Discuss with your peers how to manage and implement autonomous software systems, what's the best architectural stack for you, and how can evolve from wherever your organization is today to where you'd like to be tomorrow.

Vivek Vaid
Microsoft Service Lead & Architect

Round Table 4

SOA  Delivery Realities

The benefits of SOA are attractive; re-use, less duplication, easier integration internally and externally, quicker time to market and so on.  And it's conceptually easy enough to understand the basic SOA architecture; you draw a rectangle marked 'ESB' and some lollipops sticking out the top, call them services and say 'see how everything can reuse functions and no need to rebuild any logic that already exists in your enterprise'. Then, having dazzled the audience you can move on to the next architecture problem.

That is of course the theory.  Actually making that happen unearths quite a number of challenges which need solving, and lead some to question whether SOA can be implemented sufficiently purely to gain those conceptual benefits.  We think it can, but that doesn't detract from the real-world difficulty, and that's what this session will be all about.

Robert Pepper
IT Architect

Round Table 5

Mythbusters #1 Myth -
Developing applications in the Cloud is difficult and requires new skill

There's a commonly held belief that developing in the cloud will require developers to learn new skills; that creating valuable applications is difficult and that the result is less functional than applications developed with traditional platforms such as .NET or Java.  Platform as a service (PaaS) does not replace traditional platforms but offers a solution programmers can leverage the inherent advantages offered by creating and delivering client platform neutral applications.  Traditional platform developers can add PaaS to their existing tool-set, combining the inherent advantages in each.  In summary use the most appropriate platform to meet the need.

Mike Burnside
(Melbourne)

Derek Laney
Senior Product Specialist
(Sydney Only)

Round Table 6

Thick clients, smart clients, desktop development and SOA

How can you apply SOA when designing applications that live on the desktop but require central connectivity? This session will discuss the key drivers for SOA with “smart clients” and the specific challenges that exist in this environment, including:

• Managing trust and security
• Location of business logic
• Designing and testing for performance and compatibility
• Strategies for structuring development
• Selling a smart client SOA strategy to the business and the development team

Chris Seymour
Supervising Consultant

Round Table 7

Service economics for SOA

How do you get services projects in a large or medium organisation off the ground?  Everyone agrees that SOA is a good thing, but when it comes to actually funding a project, especially one that crosses organisational silos, that support and agreement often seem to evaporate.  This Round-Table asks the question “how do you build a business case for SOA?”, and suggests some possible approaches.  Come with your own suggestions and stories of challenges in generating business-side interest in SOA projects!

Nigel Watson 
Architect Advisor

Round Table 8

Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) - Deployment and Service Management 

(Melbourne Only) 

This topic explains application of service orientation principles ie IT infrastructure as a service,  to the deployment  and ongoing service management of SOA application environment. While a complete service oriented enterprise architecture will comprise of application architecture, business architecture and infrastructure architecture, this topic provides a snapshot of key considerations for the installation and management/monitoring of underlying infrastructure. The round table discussion will focus on virtualised environments and how these environments complement SOA application support.

Arun Gupta
Senior Infrastructure Architect
IBM Global Account AP

Coal Face Experiences of An Architect on Large SOA Engagements

(Sydney Only)  

Like the scientific debate on the man-made global warming, the debate on SOA is alive and well - there are proponents, dissenters and doubters; we, the proponents, don't have all the answers - but we do have some - the aim of the roundtable is to:

• Firstly to provide a prospective on why we need a method for SOA, its common  elements with architectural practices we’ve been doing for years and its differences
• Secondly to describe how IBM’s SOMA method addresses the commonalities and the differences
• Finally to pass on guidance and material borne from experience at the coalface to use on SOA delivery engagement; topics covered include team structure, the roles, interdependence with other team activities and work-products, estimation, standards, links with business modelling.

Kathryn Kennedy
Senior IT Architect,
Global Business Service

 12.10 – 13.00 

 Choose to attend one Round Table

Round Table 1

Pragmatic Domain - Driven Design

Domain-Driven Design suggests a few patterns for the design of a system - amongst them Separated Core, Value Objects, Anti-Corruption Layer. In theory these all make sense however in practice pragmatism and timelines intrude. Things such as persistance mechanism, transaction semantics, annotations and user interface all intrude on a design. This roundtable discussion looks at how people have dealt with different situations. It starts with a quick DDD overview and some of the situations we often encounter and how we have dealt with them in an SOA world. 

Steven Williams,
Supervising Consultant  

Round Table 2

When Aspect Oriented Architecture meets Service Oriented Architecture

This round table describes key elements of CBA’s architecture, demonstrating how Aspect-Oriented development using WCF Behaviours can make it easier to adhere to core SOA tenets with less code.   This discussion centres around the benefits and challenges Aspect-Oriented Architecture (AOA) can bring to the enterprise applications.  We’ll bring to the table real-life examples of how some of Microsoft’s major enterprise customers are using AOA principles and techniques in the in-house development process.  We will also discuss how AOA can help teams with heterogeneous development skills stay agile while enforcing consistent design and avoiding bugs and errors caused by inappropriate usage of application frameworks.

(Melbourne Presenter) -
Yuri Misnik, Microsoft Services Architect

(Sydney Presenter) -
Tom Hollander

Round Table 3

SOA at Macquarie Equities

Gaurav Singh, Enterprise Architect at Macquarie's Equities Management Group, will open this session talking about the use of SOA at the bank, lessons learned and benefits realised. This will be followed by a round table discussion of SOA principles, implementation strategies, and adoption roadmaps.

 
Gaurav Singh
Enterprise Architect
Macquarie Equities

Round Table 4

How do you govern IT assets when The Terminator is not around?

With increases in the use of Service Oriented Architectural styles within organisations, one of the current hot topics has become the problem of governing software IT assets. In the absence of death robots sent back from the future by CIOs faced with snarled masses of decaying components, services and architecture, we must attempt to define our own strategies for software asset management and governance. This round table will explore the current issues, environment and approaches to date, in order to solicit ideas for what works and what doesn't, and provide ideas for IT asset management in the future.

(Melbourne Presenter) - Davyd Norris, Senior IT Architect, Rational Brand, IBM Australia/New Zealand Software Group

(Sydney Presenter) - Richard Dowling, Lead Architect, Rational Brand, IBM Australia/New Zealand Software Group

Round Table 5

Mythbusters #2 Myth -
Integration in the Cloud is time consuming and insecure

Integration in the cloud is often approached with caution and concern.  Will the internet add time and complexity and can it be secure?  Integrating to business ready web services such as the force.com API is not only secure but mature.  Standards based web services APIs mean developers can build integrations using their weapon of choice.  Respected middleware providers who support integration with the cloud out of the box bring simplicity and reduce the learning curve.  Flexible UIs allow valuable or sensitive information to be seamlessly integrated "at the glass" using mash-up techniques pioneered by the consumer web even if the information remains behind the firewall.

Clayton Brown
Senior Solution Consultant

Round Table 6

Mythbusters #3 Myth -
Data is less secure in a cloud environment

Organisations often contend that their data is in a more secure environment within their walls.  Vulnerabilities are regularly found in systems, with an in-house facility multiple dependencies, time and shear scale prevent these holes being fixed in a reasonable time frame.  This often results in patches never being deployed due to concerned impact on deployed functionality or being several releases behind the current security practice.  Can PaaS environments better keep pace with the changing face of security threats.  Can they actually make it easier to manage privileges and monitor data use, while improving access to data from any networked device, ensuring that everyone sees the same information at the same time.  Is the conscientious administration of information security more important than the physical location of data.

Mike Burnside
(Melbourne)

Derek Laney
Senior Product Specialist
(Sydney Only) 

Round Table 7

Governing, without constraining, SOA and Saas

How do you deliver the benefits of SOA/SaaS and Opportunistic Development in a controlled manner without constraining innovation? How do you avoid the “Access Application” sprawl of the past? Is this a governance problem? Is this a technology problem? Is this a management problem? Is this a process problem? Is this an Enterprise Architecture problem? This Round-Table asks the question “How do you control SOA, SaaS and Mashup implementations in your organisation without constraining them?” and suggests some possible approaches.  Come with your own suggestions and stories of for enabling real business value without constraining it.

Graham Elliot
Architect
Microsoft Consulting Services

Round Table 8

Pragmatic Web Service Security

The stack of specifications for security in Web services is getting tall and it is becoming increasingly harder to determine how they can add value beyond existing security models. Both big vendors and open source tools claim to support these specifications, but frequently only a subset of the functionality is actually supported, leading to integration nightmares. We will give an overview of which of the specifications we think are mature enough for use in service development and follow on with a discussion on people's experiences with Web service security.

 
Halvard Skogsrud
Consultant

13.00 – 14.05

 Lunch 

14.10 – 15.00

 Choice of three breakout sessions

Breakout 1

Securing a Federated SOA

What is the next frontier for SOA?  What should you be thinking about next?  The answer is that SOA is expanding beyond the boundary of single organizations.  It is evolving into federations of SOA enabled organizations that can partner to work successfully together.  The question is, how do we make this happen?

Security is the key issue and the key enabler for creation of a federation of SOA enabled organizations.  Without a well thought out security architecture that enables trust to be established within the federation, federated SOA just cannot evolve.

The session will outline a client case study describing a federated SOA within a set of government agencies. It will describe the business requirements, the security architecture and the key architectural decisions that allowed for the creation of the SOA federation. The project involves a Government Services Bus and the enabling of both user and service based interactions between the cooperating government agencies.

 
Dr Paul Ashley, Lead Architect ,SOA Advanced Technology, IBM Australia/New Zealand

Breakout 2

Restful SOA

For many architects, SOA is about Web Services and Web Services is about SOAP.  There is another point of view that yearns for a the broad reach and light weight nature of the REST approach.  Can RESTful Web Services co-exist with web services in an SOA?  What are the differences between the two?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of the REST model?

Ron Jacobs
Sr Technical Evangelist,
Microsoft Platform Evangelism Group

Breakout 3

Lightweight SOA Through Web Widgets

Although we all know SOA is not about big specifications and big vendors, it is hard to think of a scenario where those are not present. In this session we will discuss a real case of a company that had to integrate over 100 heavy traffic websites. The old shared database architecture wasn’t up to the Web 2.0 world; the solution came in format of a new architecture using a very lightweight SOA approach using mashups, web widgets and the RESTul architectural style.

Phillip Calcado
Senior Consultant

 15.00 - 15.15

Afternoon Tea  

 15.15 – 16.05

 Choose to attend one Round Table

Round Table 1

SOA and CBD 

Since the introduction of SOA, Component Based Design (CBD) has received very little press coverage. Does this mean that CBD is no longer relevant? Has SOA made CBD redundant?

In this session, we’ll explore the synergies between SOA and CBD. We’ll look at how you can build your SOA using a component based approach to increase re-use, make your services more flexible and reduce ongoing maintenance costs. 

Peter Diggins
Principal Consultant

Round Table 2

Extra-enterprise considerations: thinking about cloud services
(1 of 2)

This round table examines the business imperatives for enterprises looking at consuming services from the cloud.  What sort of things are business drivers for third-party service adoption?  What are some of the blockers?  Why would your business stakeholders choose to outsource capability instead of retaining this in-house?  This session looks at some of the thinking around this topic distilled by many conversations with customers, partners and members of the technology community.

Gianpaolo Carraro
Director,
Architecture Strategy

Round Table 3