Chris Greenslade (Supplier Council) and Carl Bunje (Customer Council) welcomed members
to this joint Supplier Council and Customer Council members meeting. The meeting was
attended by approximately 50 members.
Chris Harding then gave a short presentation to explain what
the new UDEF Forum is about - its vision and mission is to establish the UDEF as the
universally used categorization system for data, by developing it as an open systems
standard and promoting its adoption. The web site for this new forum is www.opengroup.org/udef.
Chris Harding then gave a further short presentation on The
Open Group's plans for the plenary meeting on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). He
described the current program of presentations and its intended coverage. He noted that
our plans for these presentations and speakers are well-advanced, but we recognize that
SOA is a very broad topic so we wish to gather members' feedback on the questions they
want answered, to ensure we deliver optimum value to our members.
Feedback included:
- It will be useful to provide first principles and guidelines for system architects - in
situations where a lot of largescale packages are deployed, how does a user integrate
legacy applications? It was suggested that the Architecture Forum should address this
issue. An Architecture Forum member responded that the Forum is looking at SOA in the
current development work for TOGAF9, and anyone who would like to contribute to this
development activity is most welcome to do so.
- The practical aspects of SOA are the most relevant to users - use cases and experience
of deployments will be most useful to hear about.
- We should cover experience of setting up effective contracts in a complex data center
using SOA.
- We should cover what vendors are doing to assure interoperability in SOA environments.
A show of hands indicated that most customer members want to implement SOA, and most
vendor members are already implementing or planning to implement support for SOA in their
products.
