Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 17) in New York, we're doing the second installment of our SOA forum. Meanwhile, on Tuesday and Wednesday, also in New York, there's the Syndicate conference, where I'll be appearing on this Wednesday panel and perhaps also on Wednesday's lunchtime RSS session.
As a blogger and also one of the planners of the InfoWorld event, should I use my blog to acknowledge and respond to this critique of our SOA forum?
The topic of service-oriented architectures is growing by leaps and bounds in the conference circuit. All of them seem to suffer from the same problem of having them too driven by vendors and not enough by those actually doing it.
...
In looking at the speaker list for the Infoworld conference, I noticed that the ratio of actual real-world executives using SOA to run their business vs. the software vendors who sell stuff to them is out of whack. [James McGovern: Thinking out Loud]
If I'm serious about the purpose of blogging, and I am, then yes, I should acknowledge and respond. James McGovern makes a fair point. The response to our May 5 event was very positive on the whole, but attendees did offer similar feedback about the practitioner/vendor ratio. In response I've asked Metratech's Jim Culbert, who's been running his business on SOA for longer than anyone I know, to join my morning panel, and I've asked Phil Windley to join my afternoon panel. Both are intensely pragmatic and will help ground the discussion.
The mid-day general discussion includes the roster from last time -- Jim Culbert, BEA's Bruce Graham, and CommerceNet's Rohit Khare -- plus the morning keynoter, Harvard's John Halamka, the world's first RFID-enabled CIO. We've also added OASIS' president and CEO, Patrick Gannon. All in all, it promises to be as eclectic a panel as I've ever seen, never mind had the pleasure to join!
At the May 5 event, InfoWorld's CEO and editorial director Kevin McKean floated the idea of a series of future events in which we'll drill down on SOA in vertical industries. It's always tricky to find practitioners who can be specific about their implementations, given the competitive nature of the information, but I'm sure it can be done. And the process should get easier over time as practitioners increasingly compare notes by way of their blogs.
How much can be shared? A trend working in our favor here, to close the loop, is service-oriented architecture itself. Like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, enterprises are making more of their infrastructure externally visible. Nobody can or should divulge proprietary secrets, but our systems are evolving in ways that will create a larger realm of sharable discourse.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/05/16.html#a1233