This week, I'm headed up and left (northwest) to the SOA Consortium meeting in Ottawa, Ontario. We have a great line-up to help us explore two themes -- "SOA Stories" and "SOA and Event Processing".
During Wednesday's SOA Stories day, we've invited speakers to share anecdotes, insights, lessons and battle scars related to real-life experience. I'm excited that Melvin Greer is returning to speak on SOA Hard Problems/SOA Spirals.
For Thursday's SOA and Event Processing day, we've invited speakers to share experiences combining SOA and Event Processing to deliver business capabilities. Interestingly, the speakers are each adding another element to the SOA - Event Processing mix. Ed Lynch from IBM adds the element of BPM, while Bruce Henderson of Savant adds the mashup perspective.
After the invited speaker talks on Thursday, I'll be moderating a roundtable discussion between invited experts and meeting attendees on the current and future relationship of SOA and event processing in the context of delivering business capabilities.
In their opening remarks, I've asked our roundtable leaders -- Ed Lynch of IBM, Bruce Henderson of Savant, Ian Foster of Cisco and Greg Peres of Sun -- to comment on any of the following SOA and event processing relationship aspects:
1) What are the business drivers and/or specific instances prompting organizations to combine SOA & Event Processing? What advantages are they gaining by using both, rather than just one?
2) What are the technology challenges in combining SOA & event processing? Is there a suggested implementation/adoption sequence? How does software/application development change?
3) What are the human/organizational elements associated with an event processing strategy? Are they similar to SOA - cultures of governance and collaboration? How does an event processing environment impact the daily lives of line and/or knowledge workers?
4) Is event processing yet another retro-technology strategy? How does/will event processing differ from pub-sub and/or straight-through processing techniques?
From there, we'll take questions (and answers) from the audience. If you listened to our last roundtables, you'll know the audience is very engaged, limiting my role to passing the microphone around.
Why am I sharing this? Two reasons. First, the meeting is open to the public. If you will be in the Ottawa area June 25-26, please consider joining us.
Second, if you'd like to share your perspective on the SOA-Event processing relationship aspects above, or submit a question to the roundtable, please leave a comment, or send me an email bmichelson at elementallinks dot com. Barring a recording calamity, podcasts from the above discussions will be available at the SOA Consortium Resource Hub.
[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links. IBM, Cisco, Savant and Sun are not clients of Elemental Links, however they are sponsors of the SOA Consortium.]
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