Negative99

I just got back from SOA World 2007 and Enterprise OpenSource 2007 conferences & expos (occurring simultaneously) in New York City at the Roosevelt Hotel.

For those who don’t know, SOA (often pronounced soh’-uh) stands for Service-oriented Architecture and is a current fad in enterprise information systems. This conference was a buzzword-fest of the highest magnitude. There were more Powerpoint slides with corporate-speak and technology catchphrases than you could garbage-collect with a Cray.

While the breakout sessions proved to be enlightening, the general sessions in the main ballroom were definite snoozers. Almost all of the general sessions were given by “sponsor representatives” who used the time to hock their products and services with an advertising pitch cleverly disguised as a SOA lecture. Normally I would have skipped these sessions to mingle on the expo floor and get vendor demos of SOA software solutions, but they deliberately closed the vendor expo area during these sessions so that attendees had nothing else to do. To further frustrate things, the multiple general sessions pushed the conference schedule past 7pm all three days!

However, not all was lost, and the breakout sessions were really worthwhile. Once you got a corporate lecturer out of the main ballroom and into a breakout room, it was like someone lifted off their managerial sales hat and gave them a developer’s cap… because these smaller venues boasted some brutally honest lectures. Some key principles that were thematic in these more down-to-Earth presentations were:

• Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• If you’re implementing SOA because your boss heard about it from some executive on the golf course, then you WILL fail.
• SOA success stories come from BIG companies with a BIG IT staff and BIG budgets.
• If your business processes aren’t yet aligned across your enterprise, then what good is a SOA?

If SOA is a forest, then web services are the trees. I will be creating a presentation soon on the basics of web services and SOA, and I’ll post it on Negative99 when I do.

I feel like we’re natives living in wood huts on a primitive desert isle. One day a steel I-beam washes ashore, and already people want to start talking about what the skyline’s going to look like.
~ Steve Mooradian