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October 18, 2007
Information on Demand – Viva Las Vegas

This week I was in Las Vegas at IBM’s Information on Demand (IOD) conference, along with 6500 IBM customers, partners, and Gold Consultants. The IBM Gold Consultants meeting occurs once a year, and is a time for IBM to bring together consultants with executives and IBM Distinguished Engineers to share what IBM has done over the past year, what they are planning to do in the next few quarters, as well as some interesting work being done by the research labs. The IOD conference started off with a big splash. The keynote started off Monday morning in a big event arena with Cirque de Soleil acrobats, a rock band, and Dana Carvey. We were well entertained.

One thing puzzled me however. Steve Mills used SOA and BPM interchangeably – as if they were the same thing and meant the same thing. The authors of SOA for Dummies. recently expressed a similar viewpoint. They told me I was totally mistaken if I thought SOA did not require BPM. In fact, they stated "Nowadays though you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the two are separate." I know the authors spent quite a lot of time with the folks at IBM, so now I understand better where the misconception may have come from. Frankly, it really bugs me when vendors, authors, analysts or anyone else make erroneous statements to supposedly simplify the message that in fact only serve to further confuse an already confused public. Both Steve Mills, and the authors of SOA for Dummies are categorically incorrect when they state SOA and BPM are one and the same. BPM adds value to SOA. SOA can hasten the implementation of a BPM solution and make it easier to change. But they are two different things and you can absolutely do one without the other. The operative word here is CAN . Best practice for enabling business agility would of course be to combine them, along with EDA and BI. For a healthy and factually correct discussion on the intersection between SOA, BPM, EDA and SI tune into the SOA in Action panel discussion Oct. 31st at 2:00 ET.

I asked Vinodh Arjun, Program Director of BPM, whether it was IBM policy to talk about SOA and BPM as being the same thing. Vinodh is responsible for BPM strategy across the product lines. He assured me it was not IBM policy to use the terms BPM and SOA synonymously. He agreed that BPM was a separate practice, but there are synergies when you implement BPM on top of SOA. In fact, BPM can deliver the business value of SOA.

A little later in the day I spoke with Andy Warzecha, Sr., VP Information Management Strategy and Information Management Software. He caught us up on the major announcements IBM made this week.

Listen to or download the podcast below:

Download file

Some key themes IBM is focusing on include the increasing importance of master data management (MDM), enterprise content management (ECM), and integrating business intelligence (BI) into the relevant steps of a business process. And of course, information is a very relevant part of the overall SOA story. IBM is investing heavily in all those areas.

Another area IBM is investing heavily in is vertical industry solutions for information models, process models, governance models, SOA solutions, etc. IBM clearly understands the benefits of asset based consulting, and leading with solutions rather than technology. It’s a winning formula.

Some interesting work being done in the research labs includes work from the IBM China Research Lab for putting semantic metadata into the MDM system, and Linkage Discover from the IBM Indian research lab. This system enables BI over multiple data types, integrating structured and unstructured data for more complete analysis. The demo showed how a customer complaint email can be parsed, and joined with relevant information from other databases. Very cool stuff. Over the years I’ve seen a number of very cool projects in the IBM research labs, and most have stayed in the labs. The researchers need to find interest and funding for their work, and need to do a lot of lobbying in order to make it to the product stage. I don’t envy them, but I do enjoy talking to them.

Posted by bethgb at 05:41 PM in Industry Trends | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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