Kyle Gabhart, a subject matter expert specializing in Service-Oriented technologies and currently serving as the Director of SOA Technology for Web Age Solutions, gave a highly entertaining and informative session this morning at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco, where SOA and virtualiation and related issues are center-stage for the next 48 hours.

Miko Matsumura, world renowned technology advisor, speaker and entrepreneur, and currently Deputy CTO at webMethods Inc., gave the Opening Keynote today at the 12th International SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 West, at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. Inspired by hundreds of real-world SOA projects from across the world, his big-picture keynote was titled: 'Time Oriented Architecture: Evolution by Design?'

BEA Systems is a leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA Enterprise 360 is the industry's most advanced approach for building a Liquid Enterprise. This comprehensive offering combines our product technologies, people, best practices, and broad network of partners to deliver maximum business value to BEA customers. BEA Enterprise 360 gives the customers the ability to harness the convergence of: 1) Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 2) Business Process Management (BPM) 3) Enterprise Social Computing.

Active Endpoints is a leading provider of SOA orchestration solutions that enable organizations to build and deploy composite, process-driven information systems based on WS-BPEL, the SOA orchestration standard. From open source to mission-critical deployments, Active Endpoints allows users quickly adapt to evolving customer demands by reducing the cost of integration, leveraging infrastructure investments, and enabling the sharing of business processes with customers, partners, and suppliers. More ISVs, financial services, government, telecommunications, high technology, and retail organizations use Active Endpoints solutions than any other BPEL technology. Headquartered in Shelton, Connecticut, Active Endpoints is privately held. For more information about Active Endpoints, visit www.active-endpoints.com.

WSO2 is an open source middleware company founded by pioneers in Web services and of members of the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. They deliver a new, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for Web services and SOA and built on Apache Axis2. WSO2's first products are the WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which are built on the WSO2 Web Services Framework. The company maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka. For more information about WSO2, visit http://wso2.com/.

Two Roads focuses on partnering with Information Technology to control and streamline the process of securing candidates, explains Two Roads' Ron Terry. 'We are able to accomplish this by working with the hiring managers to assess skills and company culture, which helps us to secure active and passive candidates. We also simplify the process of securing the right talent by locating, screening (by phone and in person), reference checking and scheduling the interview based on our consultation with the hiring manager.'

The Enterprise Service Bus provides event-driven and standards-based message services that are fundamental to large and complex enterprise infrastructures. Traditionally the ESB has focused on message delivery between different disparate server-side systems. With the use of modern Web 2.0 techniques we can now extend the ESB all the way to the browser. Messages can be delivered from the server to the Web client in real time, making the Web client an integral part of a service-oriented architecture. In this general session the speakers will introduce you to Enterprise Comet, a real-time message delivery technology that extends the Enterprise Service Bus to your browser.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Many large SOA deployments face two major challenges: how to promote service reuse and how to manage the complexity of a heterogeneous, distributed SOA that includes Java, .NET, and various legacy and packaged applications deployed across the enterprise. The solution is to implement service virtualization to make services portable and protocol independent. This session will cover the different architectural components of service virtualization - mediation, deployment, governance and service management - and the standards that make service virtualization possible.

SOA and Virtualization are currently considered to be two separate disciplines, but they no longer need to be. SOA offers the enterprise the benefits of increased agility and cost efficiency in terms of application development, reuse, and making connections across heterogeneous applications and business partners. Virtualization is creating some real cost benefits for the data center in terms of hardware, but it is still leaving most of the potential efficiency and cost savings on the table for SOA. How can teams Virtualize to improve the quality and time-to-market of SOA functionality, which does not necessarily reside under a centralized team's control? The extended organization must break the barriers of connecting these two strategies by Virtualizing their shared Behaviors, thereby multiply the expected value of virtualization.

What kind of infrastructure should enterprises adopt for mashups? How can an enterprise mashup solution best consume data sources like WSDLs, databases, portals, REST, RSS/ATOM feeds, and legacy systems? How do we orchestrate and coordinate such disparate services inside a mashup? This session will 'talk the talk' about Enterprise Mashups, outlining a working model for mashups in the real-world context of the heterogeneous enterprise, introducing and demonstrating a visual mashup interface and flexible declarative mashup language to encapsulate and implement mashups in any enterprise.

One of the business benefits organizations strive to achieve by implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture, or utilizing Web Services, is the opportunity to reuse business components. Asset reuse is one of the core drivers of the SOA or Web Service ROI calculation. Although leveraging the service concept provides an avenue for application consolidation and reuse, these same efficiencies also introduce a distinct level of business risk.

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 lifecycle. This also allows for mapping the services to an implementation architecture of right nature which could be based on 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.

The original goal of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept was to build flexible, loosely coupled systems. But any two components in a system that communicate with each other are coupled to a certain extent. As architects, our aim in deploying real world SOAs is to lessen that coupling between components. That means removing or lessening the runtime dependencies between them. These two tenets of SOA, however, loose coupling and distributed resources, are a double-edged sword: along with the potential for much greater IT flexibility and business agility, they bring the potential for harder oversight. Considering that we live in a new regulatory environment that requires much more stringent oversight, monitoring and enforcement of corporate and IT governance policies, we need a mechanism to span the service lifecycle and provide an abstraction layer that is declarative, configurable and centrally managed. 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, its role in SOA Governance, and the WS-Policy specification as the new contract abstraction for SOA.

While server virtualization promises great advantages and ROI, to date, available solutions have been too expensive and too complex, especially for organizations with tight budgets and limited staff. Today, with the help of emerging industry standards and open source technologies, all the benefits of server virtualization are available to organizations of all sizes. This session will discuss how these technologies are changing the price/performance equation and helping organizations of all sizes take server virtualization to the next level. The presenter, one of the pre-eminent experts in the industry, will highlight how companies of all sizes are leveraging the latest server virtualization technologies to:

Small businesses, Web developers, designers and ISVs want to gain more control over their Website and hosting offerings, but without the headache of the management and ongoing maintenance. Virtual Private Server (VPS) gives users a virtual dedicated environment that enables online businesses to focus on what it takes to grow their business while leaving the 'heavy lifting' to the service provider. As the creator of virtual private server technology, Verio can provide insight on the latest advances in virtual hosting and related technologies and their impact and benefits to small and midsized businesses. Attendees will learn how to take advantage of the dedicated-like features of a VPS, such as privacy and managed services to generate solid business growth.

SOA and Virtualization has existed, in various forms, and have been adopted with varying degrees of success within the modern enterprise. SOA especially has reached the point where it generally is considered to be a good idea! As a result of the wide adoption applications, services and infrastructure have been linked to form a new kind of 'organism', which is a critical part to the ongoing operation of these systems. As a result of this success a new kind of 'infrastructure fatigue' has been exposed. The stability, scalability, performance and reliability of this 'organism' is absolutely essential as the degree of interdependencies increases. Ironically, much of the resources dedicated to this infrastructure are under utilized and there is much untapped potential within the typical enterprise. This is where the combination of SOA and Virtualization appears to be a natural fit. In this presentation we'll explore the role of virtualized containers and the notion of 'adaptive infrastructure'. We'll take a look at the emergence of new ideas and capabilities of how SOA infrastructure has to change to meet the growing demands being placed upon it.

'Service virtualization' takes functionality that is common across applications and generalizes and leverages it across the business. Capabilities like multicast, encryption, load balancing, and data caching -­ traditionally applications on dedicated servers ­- have migrated into the network, where they can be virtualized andd shared by multiple applications delivered to end users across multiple devices. This session will outline the right network architecture to support strategies like Web 2.0 and virtualization of Unified Communications applications, and explain how the network can reduce complexity and management costs, enhance system resiliency and flexibility, and improve usage and efficiency of networked assets and applications.

Four years in the making, WS-BPEL 2.0 has emerged as the definitive standard to define stateful, complex and, robust service orchestrations. But why does WS-BPEL exist, what role does WS-BPEL play in a Service Oriented Architecture, and where is WS-BPEL being used? This session will introduce you to the benefits and constructs of WS-BPEL 2.0, where it fits within the SOA stack, and cover some upcoming standardized extensions to WS-BPEL, in particular BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has taken modular programming principals in to the distributed computing environment. But the functionality provided by such modules are much broader and hence, can be considered as services. When applications are deployed in a distributed computing environment there is a need for set of infrastructure services like, life cycle management, service announcement, service discovery, security, integration, etc. Applications which provides these infrastructure services make up the SOA platform. The most common approach to implement applications using SOA is to make use of web services. Considering the advantages of use of FOSS solutions in application development, its worth evaluating web service based FOSS options in building a SOA platform.

The demonstrations will illustrate practical interoperability scenarios between some of the Web Services platforms implemented by vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, BEA, and WS02. The session will cover interoperability best practices for different SOA architecture styles ranging from SOAP and REST messaging patterns to complex multi-service and multi-vendor interactions using a variety of WS-* protocols like WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, MTOM, etc.

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. But beware! Poor execution of SOA can sink an IT organization fast. This session will also reveal strategies to avoid such perilous mistakes.

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.

As enterprises gain comfort with the principles of service orientation and begin adopting SOA for large-scale, business-critical applications, they must invariably grapple with the traditional 'ilities,' e.g., reliability, scalability, and agility that challenge the architects of demanding applications. In this presentation we explore an emerging solution to these challenges - grid-based service virtualization frameworks. By providing a runtime distributed service container that abstracts service instances from the infrastructure on which they run, service virtualization approaches are enabling savvy enterprises to achieve high qualities of service for their Java, .NET, and C/C++ services.

SOA 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 an SOA model, rather than starting fresh from the ground up. In this presentation, 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 include technical as well as operational. The talk then covers 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 take away points to keep in mind when considering a SOA model.

Complex Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) based SOA environments pose a whole new level of management challenges. This session will explore the nature of those challenges by illustrating the need for a Complex Even Processor (CEP) to proactively manage your ESB.

Popular assumptions can often be dangerous. We will consider how the many unique and highly-regarded architectural characteristics of SOA, such as loose-coupling, can actually be a two-edged sword affecting the requirements, nature, and success of many important aspects of SOA, especially runtime governance. The success of any SOA requires that one must gain an understanding of the true nature, performance characteristics, and availability of the business transactions that flows in real-time through these highly distributed services and their supporting IT infrastructure. This session will emphasize practical considerations that impact SOA architects, security managers, application support personnel, and designers so that you can be prepared to deliver a verifiably reliable and successful SOA, and can effectively remediate SOA failures and risks in real-time.

In this joint session, Synovus and Active Endpoints will explain how reusing proven code to build new applications, regardless of that code's origin, allowed the community bank to provide customers with Web self-service options and other technology benefits usually considered beyond the reach of a smaller institution. By making the most of its programming resources, the bank was able to deliver Web services in line with customers' elevated expectations while keeping its focus on the personal service customers expect from a community bank. Attendees will learn about a successful strategy for building applications with loosely coupled components using ActiveBPEL, follow Synovus' considerations as the institution pursued its SOA strategy and discover the lessons learned along the way.

Launching a new Open Source, SaaS offering required Mindbridge to re-evaluate its infrastructure and resulting cost structures. The goals included: Providing stable computing platforms, Rapid server procurement, Leveraging commodity hardware, Leveraging Open Source technologies, Maintaining flexibility as new solutions are required, Integrating proprietary and Open Source solutions harmoniously, Enabling secure and reliable communications with systems regardless of their location on the Internet, Exposing elements of systems management to customers After considerable research, it was determined that the only economical way to accomplish these goals was to utilize virtualization while at the same time integrating various components using web services. This discussion will review the technologies utilized, the problems encountered and the opportunities presented by virtualizing a web infrastructure.

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.

Open source has made signficant 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. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments with a focus on ESB and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Innovative approaches for application delivery and management are in the spotlight and many say application virtualization is the next big thing. Terms like application virtualization, desktop virtualization, application streaming and others are often interchanged. These technologies are frequently mistaken for each other. No wonder there's so much confusion. This session addresses the solutions changing the way we deliver and manage applications. It will help you understand their similarities, differences and how they're related. You'll learn the functionally, benefits and challenges of each approach. Understanding these technologies will help you determine the best application delivery model to meet your organization's needs.

The astonishingly rapid rise of virtualization technology has made it a vital component of any Enterprise IT strategy today. And the technology is triggering dramatic changes in product offerings and business practices to support virtualized operational models. These breakneck speed developments have lead to a plethora of solutions, with the attendant confusion that typically surrounds fast moving technologies. In this presentation Mr Stevens will outline current trends in virtualization technologies and examine their potential impact on, and benefits for, future Enterprise IT deployments. Topics will include tradeoffs between open source and proprietary solutions, hardware integration efforts, deployment models, and long-term, high-volume serviceability/security considerations.

This session will explore how to leverage the speed and stability of OS X and the workhorse productivity of Windows in an enterprise production environment, and how to bring both to your team via virtualization. Topics of discussion include: 1) Level of integration between Windows and OS X 2) Deployment and management best practices 3) Hardware & recommended configurations 4) Common use cases

Virtual appliances represent a new opportunity to streamline and simplify software distribution for virtual environments. With a virtual appliance, software vendors can ship thoroughly tested, standard configurations that require minimal installation effort. In this session, Troan will discuss best practices on how to build virtual appliances including: 1) Building an integrated collaboration suite appliance. 2) Creating a virtual appliance image with a simple click of a button. 3) Reducing build size by creating a tailored operating system that reduces the amount of space to install, install time and the security exposure created when providing ongoing updates to the software.

Attend the Virtualization Conference & Expo for an interactive discussion presented by Scalent Systems, as Brian Korn addresses the three big 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.

Many organizations make the faulty assumption that SOA is a panacea that can and should be applied to every situation. The reality is that service orientation is not the right answer for every scenario. The expense of service orientation cannot always be recouped and in some cases service orientation can actually do more harm than good. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of selective service orientation and how to go about effectively governing the service orientation of the enterprise.

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.

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.

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 [Service Oriented Business Application] on the Intranet and Internet. To make this convergence even deeper, we need to borrow one important lesson from SOA and Web 2.0 ­ declarative or non-programming ways to create personalizeed, shareable mashups. An extended SOA mediation framework with rich user interface can provide the platform required for enterprise mashups to be a reality. In this session we will show how sa ervice mediator platform can be used as the framework for declarative and personalized enterprise mashups.