Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Like any other major change in the data center, migrating to virtual infrastructure can impact the user experience. As a starting point, you need to ensure that performance standards have been maintained. However, monitoring physical system resources does not provide an indication of the health of the application or what your customers are experiencing at any given moment. And since virtual environments are dynamic, system agent solutions are not efficient.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

TIBCO Software is a leading business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business. TIBCO has delivered the value of real-time business, what TIBCO calls The Power of Now, to over 3,000 customers around the world and in a wide variety of industries. TIBCO provides innovative software that enables interoperability between applications and information sources, coordinates processes that span systems and people, and helps companies sense and respond to events and opportunities more quickly and with more certainty and control.

Software AG is the world's largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. The company's 4,000 global customers achieve measurable business results by modernizing and automating their IT systems and rapidly building new systems and processes to meet growing business demands. Software AG's industry-leading product portfolio includes best-in-class solutions for managing data, enabling service oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining proven technology with industry expertise and best practices, its customers improve and differentiate their businesses - faster.

Every major enterprise technology vendor has developed its own SOA strategy, supported by innumerable mid-size companies and start-ups offering specific SOA aspects or entire solutions. Submit your speaking proposal today to discuss your SOA strategy at SOA World Conference & Expo on June 23-24, 2008, in New York City. Tracks will include Web 2.0/AJAX and SOA, Interop Standards and Services, Real-World SOA, SOA Technology, Virtualization, and Specially Selected Hot Topics.

SOA World Magazine announced today that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the 'Oscars of the Software Industry,' has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade.

Server virtualization is great for the data center in so many ways that it's easy to see why it's so popular. It reduces hardware costs, makes server provisioning far more flexible and ensures IT can be more responsive to business needs. At the Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West, technology experts Gordon Jackson, David Christian, Ken Jisser, and Ben Rudolph discussed the many different layers of virtualization and looked at how virtualization can help your business to succeed.

The Group discussed open source trends in systems management. Panel participants discussed both the benefits and precautions to take when investigating open source management software. Nora Denzel recently retired from Hewlett Packard as the senior vice president and general manager of HP's over one-billion dollar software division. At HP, Denzel led one of the most dramatic turn-arounds in the software industry by reinvigorating HP?s OpenView and OpenCall software product lines through both internal product development and the successful integration of over eight acquisitions. During her tenure as HP?s software chief, software sales more than doubled the bottom line improved by over 72%. She has been named as one of the top 20 'Storage Movers and Shakers' by Storage, Inc. magazine and one of the most powerful people in networking by Network World magazine.

In light of today's explosive IT infrastructure growth and complexity, organizations are increasingly adopting virtualization as a means of consolidating IT resources, simplifying management, and minimizing overhead. One of the most complex issues facing VMware users trying to fully capitalize on virtualization is managing, allocating, and protecting virtual data as they would actual data. Chris will discuss a three-pronged approach to tackling issues around virtual data in VMWare. He will provide insight on how to create a single, integrated, comprehensive and centralized interface for administering VMware data through a virtual storage infrastructure that complements VMware virtualization technology.

The success of open source software has been placing pressure on the business models of proprietary software vendors. In response, many software vendors have shifted from a paid-for license model to an open source business model. This presentation will explore the emerging trend of proprietary software vendors transitioning to an open source business model - the elimination of software licensing fees, source-code transparency, and a reliance on services as the revenue engine. It will cover the impact on software vendors and end users alike, and will include best practices from a number of companies that have already made the transition, including failed attempts.

Today's identity management systems help organizations gain control over identity information in the enterprise, however, these systems are silos - and despite industry standards, there is very little interoperability. The Bandit project provides open-source identity services that reduce the challenges of identity silos to provide a consistent approach to identity management for users and administrators, regardless of underlying systems. To continue this evolution in open-source, Bandit has partnered with the Higgins project to deliver an open-source identity system that is interoperable with Windows CardSpace. This session will demo this development milestone and explain its significance in the identity community.

Disaster Recovery 2.0 (DR 2.0), incorporates new technologies that will help organizations better prepare for a disaster, at a lower-price point. One of the main aspects of implementing a solid DR plan is adding virtualization capabilities. Virtualization is already a mainstream tool for many IT administrators to consolidate applications within their data center. In the near future, virtualization will live up to its hype - not only will it enable high availability within servers, but also desktop virtualization, which can lead the way to more use of thin client PCs. This session's speaker will discuss DR 2.0 and how virtualization acts as a key enabler.

Join us for an interactive discussion presented by Scalent Systems, as we address the big three challenges facing server failover - software configuration, network connectivity, and storage access - and contrast several different approaches, from traditional backup to the use of virtual machines, to the next generation of adaptive infrastructure.

While enterprise open source vendors continue to debate the definition of 'open,' customers are listening. Not because they care as much about what open source business model a particular vendor uses but because our debates give them reason to be confused and to consider the FUD that is pushed into the marketplace. The Open Solutions Alliance is a nonprofit vendor neutral organization that exists for one purpose: to address CIOs most pressing issue today - interoperability among open solutions. While the customers have been listening to us, the OSA has been listening very intently to them. This session will discuss what CIOs are looking for in open solutions vendors and how they expect it to be delivered based on real discussions and work sessions.

With the immediate need for exposing Web services from portals and Web applications, the various RIA (Rich Internet Application) development environments are proving to be rapid enablers. This session takes a look at AJAX techniques and Microsoft ASP.NET SharePoint Webparts that facilitate SOA enablement, and addresses key related issues - including security - that are inherently involved in these approaches.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

This is happening right now in many organizations and it extends beyond the introduction of collaboration technologies, such as wikis and blogs, to the next level of workplace interactions. Business - New software products will allow information workers to freely mix application data with publicly available Web content, in a variety of convenient formats. People - Employees, led by a new wave of Generation Y-ers entering the workforce, will forever change the way people interact with enterprise applications and information systems. Technology - Popular Web 2.0 data delivery and sharing technologies, like RSS/ATOM, AJAX, personalized homepages, tagging and social bookmarking, are open and inherently insecure.

In this session we'll talk about the notion of the Universal SOA, and how to prepare your SOA to see the outside world, and the emerging Web. It's clear that many of the services we consume and manage going forward will be services that exist outside of the enterprise, such as subscription services from guys like Salesforce.com, or perhaps emerging Web services marketplaces. This is 'outside-in' SOA, in essence reusing service in an enterprise not created by that enterprise, much as we do today with information on the Web. Thus, those services outside of the enterprise existing on the Internet create a 'Universal SOA' - ready to connect to your enterprise SOA, perhaps providing more value. This is nothing new, by the way; we've been talking Universal SOA for some time now, at least the notion, and we are just seeing bits and pieces appearing today.

The original goal of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. That meant removing or lessening the runtime dependencies between components or endpoints. One of the best, if overused, examples of loosely coupled systems is the way the Web works today. Routing, DNS, cookies, SSL handshakes, authentication, redirection, etc., are all handled by the infrastructure at runtime. Only a URL is typically required. In order to achieve this in the SOA world, contracts, requirements, and capabilities need to be defined and automated through a declarative and manageable mechanism. WSDL is far from being adequate as a complete contract language for SOA. The required level of abstraction for SOA sits at the policy level. Policies contain assertions about the operational interfaces for components in an SOA. These include credential preferences, authentication and authorization mechanisms, signature and encryption preferences, identity sources, routing, transformations, versioning, reliable messaging, and others. This talk will introduce the concept of Policy-Driven SOA and discuss Policy and the WS-Policy specification as the new contract abstraction for SOA.

The momentum behind service-oriented systems is intense and the hype machine is in full swing. Consequently, it is tempting to believe that if you slap a SOAP/REST/JSON/etc., wrapper around all your enterprise systems, you will be able to cash in on the service-oriented ROI. The fact is, there are right ways and wrong ways to design a SOA. In this session, you will learn about SOA patterns for system integration, message brokering, and data management to name of few. SOA Quality of Service (QoS) and the top five SOA anti-patterns will also be discussed.

SOA is becoming the prevailing choice for IT enterprises and the success of this transition to an SOA is based on quality of the SOA governance solution. This session will highlight why SOA governance is crucial for the successful transition to SOA. It will also discuss how to build policy enforcement contracts that can customize how service consumers and producers are able interact with existing enterprise services. The session will explore how enterprise architects and developers can build and leverage an SOA governance strategy in order to manage, share, and enforce policies around the key service artifacts across the enterprise. It will show how to effectively manage the design, execution, and management aspects of the governance infrastructure. Michael will focus on tips, best practices, and strategies on how to develop policy enforcement contracts that can be decorated across internal or external services in the enterprise enhancing the value of the SOA.

The Reference Model for SOA is an OASIS standard. It provides a vocabulary for service-oriented applications that allows people to achieve a common understanding when they talk about services. This talk will explain how to use the reference model in discussions with vendors, stakeholders, development staff, business analysts, and others who participate in the development of services. This will permit everyone to speak the same language when planning, architecting, developing, and using a SOA.

In this session Frank Cohen will introduce the technologies that go into a SOA development stack, including composite applications, application servers, ESBs, Master Data Management, registry/epository, XML parsers, Workflow engines, databases, and protocols. Called the Base Computing Stack, Frank teaches about the stack and the scalability, performance, and developer productivity problems in this environment.

According to Gartner, 80 percent of data transfer is done via FTP. A time-consuming and unreliable process born from the mainframe, FTP regularly impacts e-commerce and supply chain orders and processes, unnecessarily disrupting business and jeopardizing revenue. ESB alleviates the latency of batch data processing, eliminates data transfer inefficiencies, and is reliable even in the 'chattiest' networks. There will also be discussion of how enterprises can best leverage the benefits of ESB within their SOA strategy.

As companies embrace SOA and begin breaking apart monolithic applications, the question of how to control and secure access becomes mission critical. How do you take advantage of the flexibility inherent in a SOA while ensuring that component services are properly secured and managed through established access control policies? By decoupling the access control logic from the component services and administering it centrally, tomorrow's enterprise will be both agile and secured. This session will introduce the concept of entitlement management and demonstrate why emerging standards such as XACML are crucial to administering and enforcing policies in a SOA.

Two trends in applications architecture - AJAX RIA on the client side and service-orientation on the server side - are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. In this session, Michael Peachy will use real-world case studies to demonstrate how organizations are taking advantage of both of these advancements in application architecture to provide AJAX rich Internet applications that double the applicability of SOA investments. Attendees will hear how to deliver feature rich, high-productivity end-user applications to the business desktop.

The integration approaches of today's content management systems, where solutions are individually programmed against each of the proprietary APIs, cannot scale and the Enterprise Content management (ECM) industry is answering that call through the development of standardized programming interfaces for ECM systems. In this session, attendees will review the resulting initiative to produce a Web services-based standard for ECM and develop a better understanding of both existing and developing standards including XML, BPEL, JCR (JSR-170), XForms, and XML Schema. Attendees will also analyze and discern the suitability of each standard to various deployment architectures and problem domains.

The landscape of Web Services, and the shape of the SOA Infrastructure is changing. Widespread adoption of SOA concepts has gripped the attention of IT organizations worldwide, causing most to charge headfirst into strategic architecture and planning efforts that will have their long reaching effects into the next few decades. Different standards, new technology, and performance and security requirements all have an influence on the outcome of these initiatives. This session will identify the current trends, capabilities and limitations of implementing an SOA, along with the best and worst practices learned from early adopters.

To deliver quality SOA applications, enterprises need to focus their efforts on complete, collaborative, and continuous testing. The continuous aspect of testing is of specific importance due to the perpetual changes that occur as services evolve. Continuous testing is essential not only because bugs are particularly costly and time-consuming to fix when they appear later in the development process, but also because it reduces misunderstandings between interdependent service providers. Continuous testing is imperative to meet the growing needs of life-cycle governance, ensuring that policy, performance, and quality expectations are being met for SOA.

This session will dive straight into the middle of a real-world open source SOA implementations, showing how all the facets of how the SOA Big Rules are attained within the solution. This will cover an in-depth walkthrough, by example and demos, of: How to implement large XML Schema-driven document/literal Web services using partly Java EE 5 and partly J2EE 1.4; How security is enabled through certificate-based authentication with WS-Security; How the services are orchestrated with WS-BPEL; and how JSR-168 portlets leverage the end-user experience and how these are exposed using WSRP. The solution is based strictly on open source software and a guide for picking the right frameworks and the right products in the myriad of these will be addressed as well. Prerequisites: Knowledge of Java technology, IDEs, XML, and an interest in SOA.

There is much talk about policy and governance and in many organizations, governance by fiat is the norm. Some end users refer to it as 'management by showing the door,' or 'my way or the highway' management. As SOA expands beyond the scope of IT and into business federations, life-cycle groups and into business processes, a profound shift in emphasis happens. Despite the need for 'Control' asserted by central IT organizations, the nature of the 'Service Delivery Contract' or enforceable agreement can be used as a template to drive bilateral or multi-party SOA. Learn how federating policy can be seen as the process of identifying, documenting, enforcing, and auditing the value of integrity of agreements and relationships. This less coercive model of governance not only accelerates adoption, but decreases the risk of resistance and infighting that dooms many SOA projects.

This presentation will demonstrate a fully integrated and secured service-oriented architecture (SOA) using WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere ESB, WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere MQ, Workplace Forms, WebSphere Portal and Tivoli Access Manager - all integrated together. We will explain the various technical challenges, integration points, and implementation details of the project. Our 'Consumer Bank Account Opening Framework,' a real-world application for financial organizations, will be showcased; this includes complex forms processing, workflow, and human tasks. This session is designed to not only expand your technical knowledge of key emerging technologies but you will also learn how to leverage these technologies for industry.

We expect a lot from SOA. We want business agility to support growth, attention to customers and efficient, collaborative operations. But you can't expect what you don't inspect. Composite applications that are constantly changing call for a new testing paradigm to assure that business processes will work as expected over the complex, heterogeneous environments of multiple protocols and transports. We need visibility across ESBs, across the application life cycle and across the producer-consumer community. Agility demands automation for speed and reusability. It also requires testing functions unique to integration - which is why this is a new investment for most organizations. The risk of not becoming more agile for business results is part of the drive to make quality assurance key in any SOA initiative. Hear real-world examples of what automated end-to-end testing delivers today to several Fortune 500 companies.

'Services' are everywhere, from internally focused SOAs to public services from Federal Express, eBay, Amazon and Google. But there's no 'User' in 'SOA'. And delivering services to business users can get harder when enterprise application requirements for security and availability are added to the requirements list. AJAX (and Web 2.0 in general) represents a vast improvement of client applications in terms of usability. AJAX is the future of rich enterprise application development. Developers have the opportunity to deliver new, advanced methods for data manipulation and visualization. Most important, AJAX complements the loosely coupled nature of Services perfectly. AJAX can make the perfect delivery medium for services to business users, but this synergy requires a proper architecture. JackBe's unique combination of AJAX and SOA expertise will help attendees understand the needs and solutions to create truly Enterprise AJAX solutions using AJAX and SOA.

Java expert Mark Hansen provides a practical introduction to using Java Web services and AJAX to implement SOA. Mark covers creating, deploying, and invoking Web services that can be composed into loosely coupled SOA applications. He begins by reviewing the 'big picture,' including the challenges of Java-based SOA development. Next, he introduces the latest Java EE 5 Web services APIs and discusses how they work with AJAX. He concludes by showing how AJAX and Java Web services can be used to integrate Yahoo Shopping, eBay, and Amazon to create a universal shopping application.

This session will discuss the feasibility of adopting SOA in an organization, and what needs to be in place in order to undertake a successful SOA implementation. The discussion will include applicability of SOA standards; incorporation of technologies such as BPM, business rules, integration software, and client technologies ranging from thin to rich to thick clients. Examples from the real world will be presented for undertaking successful SOA projects, including phases of adoption and organization and cultural changes that are needed to be successful.

The confluence of several mature architectural paradigms with new user-centric paradigms will drive the next generation of IT. Next-generation IT will be based on the combination of model-driven architecture and service-oriented architecture applied to applications, information delivery, and IT resources alike. The agility gained in IT infrastructure coupled with highly configurable, lightweight, 'last mile' visualization technologies will dramatically increase the relevance and reactivity of IT to the business.

Complex Event Processing software provides the foundation for making an SOA event-driven. CEP software in an SOA environment offers re-usable processing and analysis services that are available for all applications to leverage. This approach de-couples event processing logic from the business applications enabling faster application development. Centralized, dynamic management of the event processing logic in the CEP repository and service enables rapid change without disruption to the business applications. This presentation will examine how complex event processing applies to an SOA environment. Also presenting will be Sallie Mae, a multi-billion dollar financial services firm, who is using CEP to event-enable their entire suite of service-oriented customer management applications.