Posted by Jignesh Shah, VP SOA Product Management & Marketing, Software AG.

This week Software AG hosted the fourth SOA Summit in Scottsdale, AZ.This event had some heavy odds stacked against it. The first three events were free and hosted conveniently in major cities like New York, Copenhagen and Stockholm. In contrast, we chose to make SOA Summit ‘09 a destination event requiring fees and 2-3 day travel to a resort in Scottsdale, AZ. With SOA gaining momentum, we wanted to separate serious SOA practitioners from curious bystanders. We made this plan back in September 08. Since then, the global economy has cratered, companies have put in travel freezes and some pundits have seeded doubt by declaring SOA dead. What else could go wrong? How about an “imminent pandemic” causing people to avoid travel and public gatherings?

I am happy to report that in spite of overwhelming odds, we exceeded our attendance targets and the Summit was packed to capacity. The tone and nature of conversation was markedly different from past summits. There was almost no discussion around what SOA is, why bother to adopt it and what technological elements to use. IT leaders and architects ‘get it’ and are well past that point. Instead, the conversation focused on how to use SOA (frequently in tandem with BPM) to drive ambitious business results; from ‘touchless orders’ to ‘shutting down IT as we know it by 2015 by pushing everything out to the cloud and using SOA to tie it all together’. Some attendees even brought their business counter parts to the summit (why didn’t WE think of that?!). I met several companies that were looking for a way to take early momentum and institutionalize SOA into the fabric of IT processes. John Rymer said it best – This is not the beginning of the end of SOA. It is the end of the beginning.

Posted by Sandra Wade, Senior Director Product Marketing, Software AG

2008 has certainly been a year filled with challenge and change.  As I look back and the year wraps up, I’m feeling a bit contemplative.  I find myself wondering…  Is there still concern over Baby Boomer retirements?  Are the people who are responsible for mainframe systems still unhappy with the term "legacy"?  Is the "going green" movement still going strong?  And, what’s in store for 2009?

Posted by Sandra Wade, Senior Director Product Marketing, Software AG

So, you’re convinced that you need to modernize your systems.  You can even rattle off a long list of reasons that it makes sense — SOA will offer better IT agility; an ESB will eliminate our point-to-point integration solutions and offer much greater information access and exchange across diverse systems…  The only problem is, when you talk to upper management and try to impress on them how important getting commitment and budget is to support your modernization initiative, their eyes glaze over.  Why?  Because you’re not speaking a language they understand.  

Posted by Christoph Jahn, Executive Project Manager, Software AG

For some time the topics of SOA Governance and BPM have been looked at as if they were two relatively unrelated things. And this perception is correct in the sense that you don’t have to have them together. However, more and more people realize what huge additional benefits are in for them if they combine the two things. In many cases the idea is that you need some logic to govern the actual work (design, development, testing etc.) for a process that has been modeled in a nice fancy tool.  

Posted by Jignesh Shah, Vice President, Software AG

One of the coolest (or scariest, depending on your perspective) things about SOA is that it requires a dramatically different approach to application design, development and operation. Sure, Enterprise IT is no stranger to periodic paradigm shifts in how applications are built. After all, we have all been through other ‘revolutions’ in the past - Client-Server computing, Web-based applications, application servers etc. Like these shifts in the past, SOA is now leading us to the next generation of application design and development.