1st international SOA Symposium

Yesterday the first international soa symposium started. The location is very interesting: the Ajax soccer stadium. The line up is great: Thomas Erl, David Chappell, and Dirk Krafzig are among the speakers. The content is very good. For the first time in a long time, I had trouble choosing the right track because I would like to follow all of them!
It was also the first time we (Approach) were sponsoring an event. We have a great spot for our booth. It is a nice mix of tool vendors, consultancies and customers at the conference.
The keynote yesterday was by Thomas Erl. He addressed three groups: He appealed to vendors to stick to standards, to the Industry to make standards understandable and to practitioners to make a distinction between different disciplines of SOA.

We are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA
The first session I attended was by Paul Brown, a well known author from Tibco. The presentation was well organized, and he made relevant observations. The thing that stood out for me, was that he approached the problem of SOA and BPM from the business. He talked about the current silos and stated that these would not go away, just because we are doing soa, or as he eloquently put it “we are not reorganizing the universe just because we want to do SOA”

Another track I was interested in, was the SOA and Web 2.0 track. I attended two sessions. (For some reason, the first one was in the track “SOA Industry”). It was presented by Edwin Sanders and he talked about user interface services. The concept and architecture was interesting, his approach lacked any acknowledgement of common user experience principles. Either the product (corizon) lacks this vision, or the presentation was just unclear. I hope for them, it is the latter…

The presentation by the Burton Group about user experience was very focussed on User Experience. Anne talked about persona’s, Donald Norman etc. Unfortunately the relevance for SOA was explained very clearly. I believe there is a strong link, hence our user exerience service….

In general the sessions and content is very interesting. It would be nice if the program would mention the company the speakers represent. This is very relevant when you select the sessions that you want to attend.

I am sitting in our booth, typing this. I am looking forward to another interesting day. For me this is already a success and I hope that this conference will be continued next year.

Mike in the Approach Booth