British Telecom Openreach Portal is one of new breed open-source portal platforms that have embraced new and futuristic technologies to provide an unparalleled service to end customers. BT Openreach Portal provides the facility for UK-based communication providers (CPs) to manage and service their end customer orders ranging from a simple phone connection and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) to fiber-based private circuits. Being largely a B2B portal, it provided Openreach standardized, silo-based services to the CPs. This provided too rigid a framework for the CPs to manage and access their orders as well as carry out the required order journeys and did not provide a CP-oriented view of data and execution. Further, the rigid deployment architecture hindered the CPs from personalizing their order journeys as well as prevented BT from deploying new or customized services. In this session we will examine how the SOA and Web 2.0 technology-based platform developed in Openreach Portal by wiring up the existing rigid flows and deploying them for execution, through Web and Web service interfaces in real-time and zero down time, gave the power to end users to define their own services and flows.

Apache Tuscany provides an open source services infrastructure for building SOA. It's based on the widely supported Service Component Architecture (SCA) specification. With the Tuscany implementation of SCA, application developers can easily create or reuse services in different languages (BPEL, Java or various scripting languages) and assemble and deploy them in a distributed environment. This session will introduce SCA and explain how this open source implementation of SCA will simplify the building of SOA solutions.

It's time to get busy. With WS-BPEL 2.0, the SOA community now has a robust, pervasive orchestration standard. Using BPEL, it's fast and easy to integrate service endpoints and deliver high-powered composite applications. Learn how organizations are putting BPEL to work to drive real value from their Web services and Web 2.0 development projects. This session will combine use cases, best practices, and a discussion of adjacent standards to provide a complete picture of the rapidly evolving SOA orchestration landscape.

In the mid-1990s, just before the dot-com boom and the growth of the Internet as a platform, virtually all software used by companies and individual consumers was packaged and commercially licensed. In the meantime, we have seen the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, consolidation of packaged software vendors, major advances in software technology, a new wave of technology startups, and a 'flattening' of the world. These developments have led to the rise of Software as a Service and open source software, as well as new business models for software companies, and the emergence of new companies based on those concepts. This talk gives an overview of these developments, including their implications for software companies and users, along with some speculation about what's ahead.

The Web was a 20-year setback for user experience. Only now are technologies and products emerging that can bring us the interactivity we traded away for access to distributed information when the Web took over. This session will present the possibilities for a highly interactive user experience, including industry best practices and war stories from the career of the speaker. In particular, he will review Web 2.0 technologies as well as the new capabilities of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

In traditional application architectures, the design phase in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) plays a critical role in enabling well-architected solutions. Yet there hasn't been much discussion about the design or the modelling phase of SOA-based applications. Translating the business requirements into services and service models allows for leveraging services throughout the life cycle. This also allows for mapping the services to an implementation architecture of the right nature, which could be based on a component model like EJB or a simple database infrastructure. SOA is all about reuse and leveraging existing investments and a model-driven SOA allows for an intersection between requirements established as services and their implementation based on existing infrastructure and new components. This enables the business visibility into IT by making the changes visible in both directions: requirements and implementation. A demo will be using Sybase WorkSpace.

As enterprises evolve toward SOA, many underestimate the impact a proper testing strategy has on the enterprise agility and successful realization of the SOA ROI. In fact, the distributed nature of SOA demands a new paradigm on how reusable services are developed, tested, and evolved along the changing business demands. This session will explain the reasons why an automated regression testing process that is tailored for SOA is critical for organizations applying SOA, and explores 10 activities that serve as the necessary pillars for a streamlined, efficient and predictable development and testing process for SOA services.

The information overload on SOA largely describes the merits and principles of SOA and the variety of products intended to address SOA needs. There is, however, an acute dearth of information on bridging the gap between wanting to get started and actually deploying an SOA implementation game plan. This document is written to help fill that gap. Separating hype from reality, distilling the essential from the desirable, explicitly addressing the how-to, nuts and bolts of SOA implementation is addressed. It's about getting started, showing the incremental rewards of SOA adoption and continuing to link deployment of technology with business goals.

Enterprises continue to look for return on investment of their service-orientated architectures, and it is Enterprise Web 2.0 that makes this possible by connecting the last mile of SOA to end-users. This is a win-win-win solution for the enterprise; where not only IT, and end-users benefit but businesses benefits as well, from increased ROI and enhanced use and IT productivity. The last mile of SOA needs to be bridged in order for IT to fully reap the benefits of their efforts by squeezing the last bit of ROI out of their infrastructure. To achieve this, IT needs to make SOA tangible to end-users, while maintaining enterprise control and reliability. This session will explore: Service Oriented Architectures: Meaningful to IT, Intangible to End-Users, Rich Internet Applications: Meaningful to End-Users, Intangible to IT, Enterprise Web 2.0: Meaningful to Both, Controlling the Desktop Environment, Good Communication is a Must for any Relationship,Ubiquitous Consumption of Services. Attendees of this session will be able to identify the best solution to meet their SOA needs.

As organizations introduce service orientation as a computing theme formally supported through enterprise architecture, they are encountering several obstacles. Service orientation promotes the sharing of capabilities across traditional enterprise system, information, and application boundaries. In this session we will review how we can reduce friction and manage the organizational change associated with the introduction of an enterprise SOA program and the common governance models that are emerging. We will also discuss how the discipline of enterprise architecture governance is being applied to SOA and provide an overview of how governance automation systems are evolving to support the 'socialization of service orientation' through an 'early-cycle' governance model and 'closed-loop' SOA infrastructure.

The two most powerful forces shaping enterprise software today are software as a service (SaaS) and open source software (OSS). Previously separate, they are now converging into a powerful 'SaaS + OSS' model destined to become the dominant business model for enterprise software. Using case studies, the session will review how vendors can use this model to scale rapidly, use capital efficiently, and acquire customers for a low marginal cost. The presentation will also address how the model delivers unprecedented value to end-customers through lower total cost of ownership, higher quality, faster deployments, improved support, enhanced collaboration, and greater transparency.

According to IBM, Gartner, and other industry pundits, SOA applications will usher in a major replacement of the legacy systems that currently power organizations and commerce around the world. ZapThink, by contrast, sees SOA as a technology that will extend the value of existing legacy applications. While SOA architectural components are well understood and available from a variety of vendors, organizations are fundamentally on their own to create the business logic essential to introducing an SOA-compliant application. Many organizations experience a Trough of Disillusionment, as business satisfaction with IT declines, after the embracing of SOA actually slows the arrival of the next important application because of the problems associated with conceiving, designing, building, and testing business services. TenFold and its founders are business applications specialists and are pioneering a model-driven approach that exploits model-driven metadata to specify business logic without programming.

When an enterprise starts moving in a SOA direction, probably the most important question is how to get buy-in from your business users, who most likely don't know what SOA is and could care less what technology IT uses to get them the data: just get the things done. Unless you work in a perfect enterprise, your business users are not too happy with time-to-market when it comes to deployment of new projects, ad hoc reports, and changes in the workflows. In this session Yakov Fain will show you how introducing Rich Internet Applications, married with rapid application development and online reporting created on the fly by your end users, can help your enterprise, your career, and SOA/RIA adoption in your organization.

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, http://www.oas is-open.org) is a member-led, international, non-profit standards consortium focused on global e-business. OASIS drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. It was founded in 1993 and now operates with over 500 member organizations and over 5,000 participants in over 80 countries. There are over 60 OASIS Technical Committees producing royalty-free and RAND standards. The open OASIS technical process is expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS cooperates with over 50 other standards and industry organizations to reduce duplication and promote interoperability for OASIS Standards. This presentation will give an update on the latest OASIS standards relevant to the SOA community and discuss the correlation between open standards and open source.

To ensure successful SOA implementation, companies should reconsider how they provide decision services. The unmanageable, black-box approach of wrapping legacy code does not work. BRMS (Business Rules Management System) helps companies meet the SOA promises of reuse and agility with Transparent Decision Services that are truly reusable, modeled by business analysts, maintained by business teams, and managed by IT. BRMS allows externalized decision logic, are modeled and maintained by business teams and analysts, managed by IT, allow automatic auditable capture with extensive reporting, and are easy to repurpose and maintain.

This session will explore the vastly different cost models of SOA and traditional point-to-point architecture and present a simple but powerful ROI model that can be used by anyone to justify SOA expenditures and even guide implementation. This exciting model unearths the dark secret of traditional architecture spending and illuminates the potential for exponential returns from well-placed SOA investments. The audience will come away with a firm understanding of how SOA, when executed properly, can dramatically reduce IT maintenance spending, allowing valuable resources to be directed toward revenue-generating activities instead.

Application virtualization is a technologically elegant solution that isolates applications and reduces conflicts. That's good for IT management and has the additional virtue of being financially alluring. From legacy to the latest enterprise business applications, virtualized deployment eases management and supports secure access. Companies save money and boost efficiency using application virtualization within any IT infrastructure. Attendees will learn details of how, when and why application virtualization is a best practice for enterprise IT. This talk covers the fundamentals of application virtualization and technical issues from terminal server to desktop. Using case instances to illustrate benefits in various architectures, the discussion includes scenarios that detail migration and IT architectural shifts incorporating application virtualization.

The adoption of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigms to perform more critical online transactions has resulted in the urgent need to audit and assess these applications for security vulnerabilities. Many enterprises are currently developing new Web Services and/or adding and acquiring Web services functionality into existing applications, and with cyber crime also on the rise, Web services security is more important than ever and businesses must incorporate security best practices into application development. In order for Web services to reach its full potential, inherent security issues must be recognized and addressed. This session will demonstrate common Web services vulnerabilities, techniques for exploiting and protecting Web services and the attacks that they can enable. Participants will learn, through an interactive demonstration, what vulnerability indicators hackers look for and the various methods used to exploit them. Due to the fact that enterprises continue the push to build and deploy Web services to meet future online security changes, the audience will learn how to discover vulnerabilities within their own Web services applications as well as tips and techniques for building and securing next-generation applications.

Server virtualization is becoming increasingly popular as a strategy to reduce costs and streamline operations, and is often seen as a relatively simple way to reduce personnel requirements, save money on software licenses, and increase reliability. In reality, however, virtualization raises technical and resource issues that require careful planning, as well as coordination with business users. Ideally, virtualization is only one component of a broader resource optimization strategy, rather than an end in itself. This discussion will examine some of the common misperceptions surrounding server virtualization, and outline the basic elements of an optimized approach to infrastructure management.

Anyone listening to or reading many of the vendor statements and pundit analysis these days can be forgiven if they think that SOA is pervasive across all organizations large and small. However, most complete SOA efforts are still few and far between. In most cases, organizations are wrestling with a spaghetti architecture of Web services. In this session, we will examine the results of recent survey data to get a picture of the progress of SOA in organizations, and work that still needs to be done.

The releases of Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) together with the evolution of the J2EE Web services platforms are some of the factors that have significantly increased the software architect's options for Web services interoperability scenarios. Although interoperability is just one facet in the SOA proposition, it is one that has become more complex due mainly to the proliferation of WS- standards, as well as the evolution of the core Web services standards of SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc. Today, ensuring interoperability between the dozen or so available Web services platforms, e.g., WCF, Oracle, BEA, IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP-Systinet and WS02, requires that you carefully address issues such as version compatibility as well as the proper design of service, data, and message contracts. When you factor in the first implementations of J2EE's Software Component Architecture (SCA) and Java Business Integration (JBI) standards, Web service platform interoperability becomes one the most interesting challenges in the software architect's horizon. The session will also present best practices, patterns and techniques for proper design of interoperability solutions between the different Web services platforms implemented by Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP-Systinet, Sun Microsystems, BEA, and WS02.

The reason for much of the chatter about mashups and Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) arises from the fact that mashups, and Web 2.0 in general, are primarily social phenomena, while SOBAs, and SOA generally, are primarily business phenomena: the 'B' in 'SOBA' indicates their purpose is to deliver flexible IT resources to meet continually changing business needs. Does it make sense, then, to consider an enterprise mashup to be a rich, collaborative SOBA consumer environment? For a mashup to be an enterprise mashup in that it addresses a particular business problem, tight coupling between provider and consumer software would be a serious concern. Most of today's mashups, however, care little about loose coupling. Mashups that meet business needs, therefore, will require SOA, and the SOA infrastructure necessary to guarantee loose coupling.

Service-oriented architecture concepts have been around for a while and all of the benefits and promises it offers look good on paper. The complexity of implementing and deploying SOA in large enterprises is, however, often overlooked. The problems get further exacerbated when trying to migrate from existing monolithic Web applications and its infrastructure to a SOA model, rather than starting fresh from the ground up. In this session, after a brief recap of the SOA model and its benefits, some of the real challenges in moving to the SOA model in a large enterprise are discussed. These challenges are technical as well as operational. The session will then cover how we are addressing some of these challenges in building the SOA platform at eBay, without getting into eBay specifics. The session concludes with some key takeaway points to keep in mind when considering a SOA model.

Convincing stakeholders that security should be a central precept in SOA lifecycle processes can be challenging. It requires using working, hands-on examples to shatter preconceptions and then demonstrating effective, layered defenses to establish belief in the practices. Laying down defenses invariably costs development and runtime resources, often reducing flexibility in the name of protection. This is distasteful to many and counter to the principles of service-oriented architectures. Champions must be nurtured to carry the flag and apply a consistent measured approach to tenaciously defending vulnerable services.

You wouldn't know it, but virtualization has been around for quite some time. Virtually everything in the IT space has some notion of virtualization associated with it from microprocessors, to networks, to storage, and, finally, to servers. But, have you noticed that many of these are focused on infrastructure and IT related benefits such as utilization or decreased costs? What about business value? How do they enable realization and acceleration of business objectives? In this session we'll discuss higher orders of virtualization, namely application and data virtualization, and how they complement traditional IT focused virtualization techniques to turn infrastructures into competitive advantages.

As a small start-up, Interface21 has developed a large, loyal community around the Spring Framework and Spring Portfolio projects. Venture capitalists have invested millions in open source companies and large vendors like IBM and BEA have spent millions of dollars attempting to crank up their marketing machines around their open source projects. In general, these efforts have not resulted in successful communities. In this presentation, we will explore the characteristics that all successful open source communities share as well as unsuccessful open source projects and how these characteristics are changing over time.

The two biggest trends affecting IT today are SOA and open source. Many developers and architects are looking to speed adoption of SOA by leveraging open source. Because both SOA and open source offer long-term reductions in cost coupled with an increase in flexibility and innovation, it is natural that SOA and open source are being used as a powerful combination for new IT initiatives. While open source provides many benefits, there are still many scenarios where a combination of open and closed source software are required. This session will provide an overview of open source projects and products for SOA and discuss how to effectively use open and closed source software together.

With SOA, companies are deploying a new class of increasingly complex, mission-critical applications. SOA allows quick changes and reactions to business needs. But this flexibility comes with a cost - the inability to effectively manage production application performance. Companies need successful application performance management (APM) to ensure this, and the best way to ensure APM success in SOA environments is through modeling. This presentation will address: why modeling is uniquely able to handle SOA applications complexities; real-world examples of traditional versus model-based APM approaches; and how IT organizations can significantly improve the ROI of their APM systems.

Lost in the hype around Web 2.0 and AJAX is the fact that your visually attractive Web 2.0 application actually needs to do something useful. In this session we'll illustrate an AJAX application generated from XML-based models. Given that standards-based starting point, we'll illustrate how to generate XForms applications that handle data and workflows. Even more important, we'll change the business process definition and the data structures underlying the application, then use XSLT to regenerate the interface. This ensures that the beautiful AJAX interface stays synchronized with the model of the application.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

Hal Stern lays out thought-provoking possibilities, constraints, and some key social and technological implications of Web-next, open source and virtualization for data & application development, security & identity.

Two trends in applications architecture AJAX RIA (Rich Internet Applications) on the client side and service-orientation on the server side are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. This session will present best practices for developing SOA and AJAX RIA in parallel, focusing on design methodologies that take advantage of the synergies between the two. Attendees will learn how to publish/subscribe architectures, facilitate group development and enforce modular design patterns, what to look for in RIA toolkits, as well as how to best ensure feature-rich, high productivity end user applications.

I just came back from SOA World 2007 in the beautiful city of San Francisco. What a nice city, I always love visiting this charming town. But anyway, the reason for my trip was to attend SOA World 2007, so I had no time to enjoy this lovely place. I see some really important shifts in people's perception and adoption of SOA infrastructure.

The convergence of Web 2.0 mashups and service-oriented architecture - a.k.a. the Enterprise Mashup - can create a world of opportunities for enterprises to come up with internal and customer-facing self-service, composite and 'situational' applications. These applications can be created just-in-time by empowered enterprise business users and by simply combining SOA-enabled information sources and services or SOBAs on the Intranet and Internet.

Today's SOA practitioners find their greatest architecture challenges addressing reliability and scalability for composite applications and processing large XML payloads. This session presents a breakthrough design for SOAs that deliver continuous availability and predictable scalability for services and applications in a way that is highly complementary to virtualization strategies . With new technologies for middle-tier data caching, load balancing and HA through service-level grid enablement, you can make your SOA bullet-proof.

Is SOA just another layer on the IT infrastructure? If not, are there unique characteristics of SOA that change the game? What are they? Can't I just forget about 'legacy' architectures/in frastructure and 'do SOA'? Why not? Paul Lipton, Principal Architect at CA, asked this series of non-trivial questions at the start of his General Session presentation at SOA World 2007 West in the Grand Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

In his opening keynote address yesterday at SOA World Conference & Expo, Software AG Deputy CTO Miko Matsumura challenged the audience to make service-oriented architecture (SOA) core to their enterprise operations over the coming year. Citing the transformational success of earlier adopters, Matsumura argued that current laggards risked ceding an insurmountable advantage to their competitors if they did not accelerate their adoption of SOA.

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo, that it has significantly extended the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the heterogeneous, enterprise-scale demands of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The WSO2 ESB 1.5 adds the ability to run scheduled tasks, caching and other performance enhancements, message augmentation using standard databases, and a wide variety of file systems and FTP. Also new to Version 1.5 are support for XQuery and a simplified Plain Old Java Object (POJO) model based on the Command pattern.

NextAxiom's service-oriented innovation unifies integration and application component development into a single paradigm. This unified approach enables 'inside-out' integration without the need to replicate data reducing the integration cost by 80%. The NextAxiom Service Virtual Machine (SVM) provides unparalleled reusability of integration and business logic across silos of software applications. For more information about NextAxiom, visit www.nextaxiom.com