The Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, Austin
Day One Highlights

Following opening remarks from Allen Brown, The Open Group President and CEO, Alisha Ring, President, Austin Technology Council, gave everyone a warm welcome to Austin and provided an overview of her organization’s role in supporting the region’s technology leadership and innovation. The council is a member-driven association of business and organization executive leaders, working together to promote the growth and success of Austin's technology sector.

Dave Linthicum, CEO of the Linthicum Group, delivered a keynote address about the relationship between SOA and enterprise architecture. He kicked off his address with a rather controversial yet undisputed observation: "There seem to be two worlds out there, the world of enterprise architecture and the world of SOA. The funny thing is that those in each world thinks that they can do the other world’s jobs." Dave went on to predict that in five years SOA won’t exist outside the context of enterprise architecture and offered several cases for why this convergence was inevitable. For more highlights on Dave’s address, check out his Real World SOA Blog.

Rob High Jr., SOA Foundation Chief Architect, IBM Distinguished Engineer, followed with a presentation entitled "The SOA Foundation; A Framework for Delivering Business Value". He explained that SOA has moved beyond a technology initiative to something that is fundamentally about creating an alignment between business and IT. He went on to describe the SOA Foundation, industry-wide motivations for standardizing the key elements of that framework, and some of the strategic business and technology issues that are likely to evolve within it.

Following Rob High’s presentation, Joe R. Hill, EDS Fellow at EDS, discussed SOA and Outsourcing. Joe shared EDS’ view of the logical components that comprise an enterprise SOA, including point solutions, BPM, portals, and composite applications; and concluded with an overview of the core intellectual capital assets for an SOA outsourcer to understand, spanning business domain SOA solution components and accelerated client on-boarding.

After the break, Allen Brown gave an update on The Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA). The AOGEA has recruited nearly 1,200 members since launching last January, and over 100 people recently volunteered to participate in the new Ethics Workgroup. Sridhar Sudarsan, Chair of the Austin AOGEA Chapter, encouraged enterprise architects from the central Texas area to join. Ross Altman, CTO of SOA and Business Integration at Sun Microsystems, then presented on the architecture requirements for composite application development within an SOA environment. Ross argued that a major enterprise will almost never be able to implement a complete SOA architecture based on a single product. To the contrary, most enterprises will end up with a challenging mixture of SOA middleware and development tools that don’t work seamlessly together. The only way to avoid the major drawbacks to this scenario, according to Ross Altman, is to focus on the most relevant standards.

James Odell, Consultant at OLSO Software, Mihai Moldovan, Product Manager, OLSO Software, and Andy Mulholland, Global CTO for Capgemini, then provided several case studies on adaptive and collaborative SOA in action. Through these real-world scenarios, all presenters illustrated how agent technologies, in particular, have provided value to major accounts across several different vertical industries.

After the lunch break, The Open Group’s Allen Brown delivered a presentation on the evolving role of the enterprise architect. He shared his rationale for why the enterprise architect has emerged as such an important profession, and explained why certification programs based on open standards, like TOGAF and ITAC, are critical to the future advancement of the field. He also discussed the importance of the AOGEA as a professional oversight body to ensure a standard set of professional ethics and code of conduct for the enterprise architect.

Andres E. Carvallo, Chief Information Officer for Austin Energy, delivered a presentation entitled "Building an SOA to Power the Smart Grid" in which he reviewed the SOA transformation that he has been leading at Austin Energy over the past four years. He revealed the steps his team took to build the nation's first smart grid as well as the business and IT needs that drove the project. Following Andres' presentation, Douglas Darner, Enterprise Architect for Chevron, provided an overview of the value associated with adopting SOA as a key element of the Chevron Upstream Foundation Program. His presentation also highlighted the evolution of SOA at Chevron, the founding principles of the company’s implementation, as well as their core challenges.

Hans Eric Klumpen, Program Manager at Schlumberger Information Solutions, outlined the process steps for analyzing the current state of IT systems and defining the right services for driving business value. According to Hans, the process includes Service Identification, Service Definitions, Service Specification, and Implementation/Deployment. Abhijit Gupta, Chief Enterprise Architect for Personal & Corporate Banking IT & Operations at Deutsche Bank, made the case for SOA at Deutsche Bank to a caffeinated crowd after the coffee break. According to Abhijit, for IT to continue to be partners in performance to the business, the bank needed to focus on consistency and flexibility to support speed to market, industrialization, and entry into new markets.

Following Abhijit Gupta’s address, a panel of well-known industry analysts, trade press, and other assorted experts discussed and dissected current SOA-related trends and gave their predictions on the future of SOA. The panel, moderated by Dana Gardner, President and Principal Analyst of Interarbor Solutions, included return appearances by InfoWorld’s Executive Editor at Large, Eric Knorr and OnStrategy’s Principal Analyst, Tony Baer, in addition to Beth Gold Bernstein, Vice President of Strategic Products and Services for ebizQ.net, and Todd Biske, Principal Enterprise Architect for MomentumSI. Questions examined by the panel included:

• "Will SOA be consumed by enterprise architecture within the next five years?"
• "How will SOA affect the dynamics of IT as well as the business?"
• "What will happen around SOA standardization?"

Karla Norsworthy, Vice President of Software Standards at IBM, delivered the closing address on the role of open standards within the context of SOA and Web 2.0. She boiled down the core value of standards as enabling greater choice, flexibility, speed, agility, and ultimately skills. These remarks were obviously well received by a record-breaking number of attendees.