I'm now in Austin, TX, which turns out to be a cool city in TX despite the summertime heat. Apparently they're into bats, and green energy. I'm here for the Open Group's Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, where about 400 architects have converged. This morning I spoke with Allen Brown, President and CEO of the Open Group, who discussed the Open Group's initiative in creating standards and certifications for enterprise architecture. The goal of the Open Group is to elevate Enterprise Architecture to a professional level, similar to a CPA. TOGAF is the most widely implemented IT architecture method. There have been 30,000 downloads of TOGAF and there are presently 3060 certified practitioners. 80% of the Forbes 80 companies have downloaded TOGAF. In this conference SOA is a major theme - how it relates to overall enterprise architecture.
David Linthicum delivered the keynote, and spoke of SOA as a subset of IT Enterprise Architecture. In fact, he stated that SOA is really just good architecture. Have to agree with him there - it's been a known best practice for decades. Then he said that in 5 years there will be no such thing as SOA - it will just be architecture. Fellow attendees Dana Gardner ,Tony Baer and Todd Biske (we're all on a panel together in just a bit) are also discussing this point. My take is that while SOA definitely needs to be brought into the IT governance fold, it is not just an enterprise architecture issue. It fundamentally changes the way applications are developed. It's going to be a while to transition the developers skill sets. So as a term SOA will likely stay around for a while.
Rob High Jr., SOA Foundation Chief Architect, IBM Distinguished Engineer spoke about how the foundation architecture looks very much like a multi-tier distributed architecture, but the loose coupling is a key difference in the evolution of the architecture. Many of us have been saying for a while that SOA is not new, we've just finally accepted the standards to make it work.
Ross Altman, CTO Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems, spoke about future proofing the architecture for composite application development. He said the keys are model driven development, standards focused on interoperability, and a third thing I did not catch. But I plan to catch up with Ross later and hopefully do a podcast with him.
But what is really interesting is the case studies - hearing from the architects that are doing this. I'm collecting audio clips and will put together a collection of best practices and lessons learned - just can't do that real time.
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