Keynote
'Architecting SOA Applications for Business Agility'
Ron Todd, World Wide Solutions Architect, IBM Software Group, IBM
Biography
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Ron Todd is a World Wide Solutions Architect within IBM’s Software Group.
Ron works with IBM customers in helping apply Business Process Management solutions within a Services Oriented Architecture. He has worked in numerous industries, including Insurance, Telecommunications, Banking and Finance. Ron has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and has worked in different areas including software architecture, software development, project management, and technical sales. He has focused on SOA and Business Process Management software the last seven years while at Vitria Technology, Webify Solutions and IBM. Ron joined IBM through the Webify Solutions acquisition in August 2006. |
Keynote Abstract
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.
An approach to helping address these challenges is SOA-based Applications. This approach to applications offers IT Architects a new method to meet ever-changing business demands, and introduces additional considerations in the design of their solutions. Architects need to account for existing infrastructure, back office legacy applications, users, communication channels, industry standards, etc., while incorporating new technologies required to realise the promise of SOA. To achieve business agility through a SOA, IT Architects must embrace new approaches that include composite business applications, business services, business policies, and various levels of functional services, registries and repositories. While technical metadata has long been understood, the notion of “business metadata” as it relates to services must now also be accounted considered.
These new applications are dynamic in nature, not only at design time, but more specifically at runtime. An example of this dynamic capability is the ability to handle multiple versions of a service based on a channel or geography at runtime. This dynamic nature provides for contextual variability within a business process. The ability to address the contextual variability around services is unique and offers a differentiator that allows the business and IT to support the demanding requirements that they will be facing. Another benefit is that these new applications help bridge the gap between the business and IT while providing greater flexibility, not only for IT, but more importantly for the side of business that is focused on delivering bottom line value.
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.
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Locknote
'SOA: It's not big, and it's not clever'
Melbourne | Joshua Graham, Enterprise Architect, Thoughtworks
Biography
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Joshua Graham serves ThoughtWorks as an enterprise architect in the creation of large-scale, distributed and object-oriented applications and enterprise application integration.
Across 18 years in the IT industry his passion is still software, but his experience encompasses a broad range of IT aspects, including business alignment, architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, data centre operations, service delivery and system lifecycle management. |
Sydney | Jim Webber, Global Head of Architecture, Thoughtworks
Biography
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Dr. Jim Webber is the Global Head of Architecture for ThoughtWorks where he works with clients on delivering dependable service-oriented systems. Jim was formerly a senior researcher with the UK E-Science programme where he developed strategies for aligning Grid computing with Web Services practices and architectural patterns for dependable Service-Oriented computing. Jim has extensive Web Services architecture and development experience as an architect with Arjuna Technologies and was the lead developer with Hewlett-Packard on the industry's first Web Services Transaction solution.
Jim is an active speaker in the Web Services space and is co-author of the book "Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide" in addition to being a contributing author to other books and articles.
Jim holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science and Ph.D. in Parallel Computing both from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His blog is located at http://jim.webber.name. |
Locknote Abstract
In the early days of corporate computing, application silos were commonplace. As businesses became more sophisticated in their use of IT for competitive advantage, these silos became a bottleneck that prevented seamless straight-through processing and inhibited change.
To break down the silos, at first rudimentary and then increasingly sophisticated integration middleware came to market with the promise of freeing data from the tyranny of the silo. Over the years enterprise middleware has come to dominate corporate computing, and knowledge of such systems is part of every enterprise architect's toolkit.
Yet with the emergence of the Web as a scalable platform for connectivity, and the increasing reluctance for businesses to engage in such large-scale integration projects the future for both "enterprise" and "middleware" is anything but certain. Indeed with the Web and agile methods becoming accepted at scale and quality of service far in excess of most enterprises, "enterprise-y" has become a by-word for backward.
In this locknote, we will explore the history of integration middleware and take a trip into the near future where the Internet has collided with the enterprise providing scale and robustness as a ready commodity, and where agility is prized above all.