~ October 29 & 30, Minneapolis, Minnesota ~
Abstracts
The Web as Integration Architecture
Whereas most people view the World Wide Web as a continuously changing universe of information accessible through their favorite browser, the architects of the Web see it as an application integration problem of enormous scale. Not just scale in terms of distance or numbers, but also scale over time. The Web has been deliberately designed to weave together old and new applications while preserving their ability to evolve independently. While the results of our design efforts can be seen in the primary Web protocols (URI, HTTP, HTML, XML, etc.), in my definition of the REST architectural style, and in the W3C's WebArch document, we have largely glossed over the rationale, context, and beliefs that led to their adoption. In this talk, I will focus on the "why?" of software architecture and the lessons learned from applying it on the Web.
About the Presenter
Roy T. Fielding received his Ph.D. degree in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, and has been chief scientist at Day Software since 2002. Dr. Fielding is best known for his work in developing the modern World Wide Web infrastructure, defining the REST architectural style, and pioneering open source software development. He is the primary architect of the current Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1), coauthor of the Internet standards for HTTP and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), a founder of several open-source software projects, and former chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (a nonprofit charity).
Dr. Fielding has been honored by the Assoc. of Computing Machinery with the ACM Software System Award for the Apache HTTP Server, by MIT Technology Review as a member of the first TR100, and by the O'Reilly Open Source conference with the Appaloosa Award for Vision.
Cloud Computing & Cloud Integration, Presented by Informatica, salesforce.com & Amazon
One of the hot new architectures climbing the technology hype cycle is Application Platform as a Service (APaaS). Offerings in this space include Informatica On-demand, salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services to name just a few. Is Cloud Computing a valid strategy for large mission-critical applications or is it just for quick ramp-up of new capabilities and low-volume department solutions? The reality is that core business solutions are being implemented today in the cloud by companies of all sizes with impressive results. An enterprise could, in principal, implement their entire suite of applications with the only purchased software being a browser!
This presentation will explore the promise of APaaS and the present day reality. The presenters from Informatica, Salesforce.com and Amazon.com will provide a broad overview of cloud computing; what it is and what it means for business leaders, architects, and system integrators. They will discuss the challenges, such as data fragmentation and information security, and solutions that are available to address them. They will also provide an overview of their respective offerings including real-life case studies. Finally, the keynote presentation will conclude with live cloud integration demo showing how salesforce.com can be integrated with Amazon Web Services using Informatica On-demand.
About the Presenters
Sanjay Krishnamurthi, VP and Chief Architect at Informatica, is responsible for architectural planning and strategic direction for Informatica’s products. Prior to Informatica, he was architect of Netscape server products working on early versions of Netscape Web Server and Netscape Application Server. Before Netscape, Sanjay worked at Transarc/IBM where he was the main developer of Encina Transaction Monitor, a precursor to WebSphere Application Server. Sanjay has a Master’s degree in computer science from University of Wisconsin Madison and B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras.
Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research, salesforce.com, works with enterprise and entrepreneurial developers and IT managers to build a community based on Force.com: the salesforce.com Platform as a Service. Former Technology Editor of industry journals eWEEK and PC Week, he has more than 25 years' experience as a developer, consultant, educator and internationally published author with past engagements in England, Canada, Australia, China, Mexico and Brazil. He has ten years' previous industry experience in petrochemical and arctic oil production and in aerospace IT management and software research. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University; he has held faculty appointments at Pepperdine, Chapman College and UCLA.
Jeff Barr, Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism, Amazon.com, focuses on helping the Amazon Web Services developer community achieve success in building innovative and successful businesses using Amazon.com data and technology. He served as a liaison for O’Reilly & Associates technical guidebook, "Amazon Hacks." Jeff has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. He earned his bachelor degree in Computer Science from the American University
Panel Debate: Architecture Styles - Harmonizing REST, SOA, CEP or All of the Above
One of the challenges in delivering business solutions is to first agree on what objectives are desired, then to select the smallest and simplest set of architectural constraints that will achieve the business goals. As stated in the book Evaluating Software Architectures by Clements, Kazman and Klein:
“If the sponsor of a system cannot tell you what any of the quality goals are for the system, then any architecture will do."
In other words, if you don't have a clear idea of the operating requirements, which architecture style should you select to delivery the business solution? REST has been promoted as the architectural style that best fits the architecture of the web, adopting the KISS principle, but is it right in all projects? SOA is often criticized for being too heavyweight, but are all its components necessary to implement a SOA-based solution? Complex Event Processing (or Business Event Processing) is being pushed by some integration vendors, but how do current business applications fit within this paradigm? When is Plain Old XML (POX) good enough? Which of these approaches is even considering the semantic issues involved with application development and integration?
The panel discussion will explore when these architecture styles best fit business solutions. One goal of this discussion is to highlight areas where application development and integration projects have different and similar pain points, and when SOA, CEP and REST fit in these projects.
Panel Participants: Roy Fielding, Scott Nieman, John Schmidt
A Metadata Implementation for an Integration Competency Center
This case study from a Fortune 100 corporation demonstrates how an Integration Competency Center supported structured documentation of its integration assets. Application to application documentation was elaborated into physical integration configuration, requiring a detailed metamodel covering both abstract and implemented concepts
About the Presenter
Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise with a $1.3 billion IT budget.
He is author of Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2007, ISBN 0123705932).
He has held architect positions for Best Buy, Target, and Accenture, specializing in IT governance, ERP systems, enterprise application integration, metadata, and configuration management. He holds a summa B.A. in Political Science and a Master of Science in Software Engineering, both from the University of Minnesota. He is Foundation Certified in ITIL. He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.
SOA Management – Get the most out of your SOA Investment
CXO’s have bought into the benefits of SOA and started implementing SOA within their enterprise. As the SOA adoption increases within the enterprise, the management challenges will also increase exponentially. As the Enterprise Architects have started laying down the ground rules for SOA Governance, they are looking for broader management capabilities from the Plan to the Retire phase of the service. SOA Management fits the bill as it encompasses most of the SOA lifecycle stages compared to the traditional Web Services Management which is limited to runtime management. SOA Management involves defining Policies and Contracts in a central place, SOA Assurance, Provisioning, Visibility at the Operational as well as the Business level, Security and Configuration Management. It is better to tackle these challenges as early in the lifecycle so that the solution can be seamlessly integrated into your SOA landscape. This presentation will walk you through the SOA Management challenges and the solution best practices.
About the Presenter
Mohan Udyavar is a Lead Architect with Wipro Technologies and has more than twelve years of Information Technology experience. He is a TOGAF Certified Practitioner and his expertise is in the area of EAI, B2Bi and SOA. He has experience in architecting large SOA implementations and defining the SOA Governance model for some of the Fortune 500 corporations.
He is currently leading the architecture team in the Integration Competency Center of a large auto maker in North America. He was involved in creating their SOA Reference Architecture and SOA Reference Implementations. He was instrumental in architecting their first Enterprise SOA Utility Platform. He played a pivotal role in many of their legacy modernization initiatives which helped them retire their expensive legacy bespoke integrations.
The Omen of Master Data Management: From MDM to Semantic Enterprise
This presentation introduces the concept of semantic enterprise and outlines a connection between semantic enterprise and master data management (MDM) concepts. It would also show that successful transitioning to semantic enterprise requires significant improvements in enterprise metadata and especially in business metadata management. It explains the importance of supporting an enterprise-level semantic continuum from both business and IT communities by committing to development of enterprise architecture tenets that would bring both communities to a more synergetic environment.
About the Presenter
Semyon Axelrod has more than 20 years of experience in various areas of software engineering and product development as well as management and information systems.
Mr. Axelrod currently specializes in strategic IT consulting with a particular interest in enterprise architecture. His other interests are IT governance and leadership, strategic business and IT alignment, SOA, and legal and regulatory compliance challenges. Mr. Axelrod's articles can be found in DM Review, The Architecture Journal, and ComputerWorld magazines. He can be reached at semyonaxelrod@yahoo.com.
Investing in Architecture: The Road to Maturity
As companies see increasing pressure on their use of technology as an enabler and/or operational cost reduction mechanism, the role of architecture has become increasingly important. While expectations from architecture increase, it becomes imperative that the repeatability and predictability of the function are well defined. This presentation describes the connection between these value drivers, an architecture function ‘maturity’ assessment, and the importance of an investment roadmap. The information presented will include case studies of both successes and failures within an SOA implementation, Utility Computing implementation, and an Enterprise IT Strategy implementation.
About the Presenter
Tracy LeGrand is co-founder and CEO of Integrated Architecture Services, LLC (iArchSvcs.com) which focuses on driving value through architecture across Fortune 1000 companies. iArchSvcs specializes in leading the creation of strategies based standards and architectural governance. Mr. LeGrand has 20+ years of experience across multiple industries with most recent experiences in financial services.
Prior to this venture, Mr. LeGrand held the position of Chief Architect and VP of Technology Strategy and Architecture for Ameriprise Financial Inc. His responsibilities included enterprise technology strategic planning and delivery across all lines of the financial services business. Before taking this role, he served as a VP Enterprise Architect for American Express where he led the multi-year implementation of their SOA strategy and subsequent Utility Computing strategy. Mr. LeGrand has also consulted for EDS and later IBM Professional Services helping companies build middleware and architecture teams linked to strategic business initiatives.
Architecting Data for Multi-Tenant Solutions
With the rising market importance of Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS) offerings, multi-tenant data architectures are becoming more commonplace. But what is the best way to organize data for multi-tenancy? This presentation will cover prevailing multi-tenancy trends in the data and SaaS marketplace. I will also discuss a data team’s need to balance functionality and performance with the economies of scale that make multi-tenant solutions so effective.
About the Presenter
Steve Hughes is the Senior Data Architect at XATA Corporation, a trucking-industry expert in optimizing fleet operations through an on-demand SaaS model. Steve currently sets the direction for storing and using data at XATA, which includes using SQL Server and its many attached services. He is also responsible for maintaining and improving the multi-tenant data architecture that supports XATANET, XATA’s flagship product. He is a co-author of SQL Server 2005: Applied Techniques Step by Step by MS Press and Solid Quality Mentors, and he currently serves on the boards of the Minnesota SQL Server User Group and the North Central Business Intelligence Special Interest Group.
Case Study: Business-IT Process Integration With Industry Standards & Open Source
Many organizations face the challenge of understanding their different business processes, how they relate to one another, and then coming up with technology solutions to support those processes. Then an organization needs support those solutions with IT-related business processes such as portfolio management, solution delivery, and service management. Finally, these processes need to be integrated with strategic business planning, governance and enterprise architecture lifecycles. Understanding the appropriate lifecycle integration touch points is key to make sure all stakeholders are aligned. Minimizing redundancy among processes and streamlining them is key to enabling an agile enterprise. The speaker will discuss how to practically apply industry standards for process integration and how to implement end-user solutions using open source technology. This will include discussion of a case study of how the speaker’s company used the Software and Systems Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) – co-developed by the speaker at the Object Management Group (OMG) – to describe The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and its Architecture Development Method (ADM). The speaker’s company donate the TOGAF model to the Terminology and Modeling Work Group at the Architecture Forum of The Open Group. The speaker’s company then built a product – the APG TOGAF Process Library (ATPL) – based on that model using Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) Composer. The speaker will then review how end-users tailor TOGAF using the ATPL and EPF Composer and subsequently integrate their TOGAF-based EA practice with governance, portfolio management, service management and solution delivery processes (such as the Rational Unified Process).
About the Presenter
Chris Armstrong, President of Armstrong Process Group, Inc., is an internationally recognized thought leader and expert in enterprise architecture, systems engineering, software development, iterative/agile development, object oriented analysis and design, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), use case driven requirements, and process improvement.
Over the past twenty years, Chris has worked to bring modern management and engineering best practices to practical application at many different private companies and government organizations all over the world. He has worked in many different industries including financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, education, publishing, real estate, life sciences, and social services.
Chris has spoken at over 30 conferences over the last ten years including the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference, Dr. Dobb’s Architecture and Design World, OMG workshops, Software Development Expo, and the Rational Software Development Conference. Chris has written a number of articles for various publications including Cutter IT Journal, Enterprise Development, and Rational Developer Network.
In 2005, Chris started Armstrong Process Group, Inc., and continues his focus on organizational development, process improvement training and consulting, and IT professional development and certification.
Chris represents APG at the Architecture Forum at The Open Group, the Object Management Group and the Eclipse Process Framework project.
SOA: The Hype & The Reality V2.0
Integration Architect Scott Nieman presents a snapshot at the current state of integration approaches and the SOA architecture, and identifies critical gaps that often are overlooked by tool vendors and integration implementations. The lack of semantic support in many integration tools, while being able to provide quick turnaround on web services, is only accelerating unmanageable point-to-point integration. A roadmap to achieve the ebXML vision of "plug and play integration" and dynamic adaptation will be discussed. Scott will bring to the table real-life examples highlighting the contract-first vs. code-first debate, and he will let you know why REST makes him restless.
About the Presenter
Scott Nieman is a long-time proponent of business and integration process modeling, the use of facets to address semantic issues, and realigning IT to focus on capturing semantic information that can be leveraged by both integration and knowledge management resources. He helped form the ebXML 18-month initative and chaired the ebXML Registry and Repository effort for metadata management. He previously held positions of Practice Director of Integration for Venturi Partners and Norstan Consulting. He was the ANSI ASC X12 EDI voting representative while at Unisys Corporation during the hey-days of Electronic Data Interchange and served as the Vice Chair of X12's Strategic Implementation Task Group to define the strategic path to resolve integration issues related to EDI. He also was a member of the United Nations/CEFACT Techniques and Methodology Work Group which created a UML Profile for B2B integration that was incorporated into ebXML which influenced web services and SOA as its known today. Scott most recently deployed a very large-scale Criminal Justice integration environment for the City of Minneapolis based on Global Justice XML, implemented with the XAware and JBoss open source products.
Value Based Integration: A Client Driven Integration Method
The scale and complexity of the enterprise integration task can easily be overwhelming. Without careful focus on real-world priorities, an enterprise integration project can easily become a never-ending project. The enterprise integration initiatives tend to be more successful when they aim to deliver value early and often. Focus on anything other than stakeholders and real-world priorities can result in making unrealistic commitments. This can get even worse when the integration project gets funding, but then not deliver anything for a couple of years while they focus on the best-possible integration capability, assuming that business users will "flock" to their solution as soon as it is ready. However, they may find out that the initiative was cancelled in the meantime.
About the Presenter
Dr. Jamshid A. Vayghan, a Senior member of IEEE, is IBM's internal Chief Enterprise Information Architect. He has 28 years of industrial experience from which the last 22 years has been in software industry. His work in software industry has been on both enterprise and embedded systems with a focus in bridging the gap between technology and business. He is also adjunct faculty at University of Minnesota and University of St. Thomas where he teaches enterprise architecture, software engineering and strategic information system courses. His research, teaching and professional interests are in enterprise architecture, software engineering, enterprise information management systems, and data mining. He is co-author of book chapters and papers in enterprise architecture, SOA and data mining.
Optimizing Your SOA Journey with a SOA Center of Excellence
Today many companies have embraced the potential benefits of SOA; however, they also recognize that actually realizing these benefits can be both a management and technical challenge. What is the best approach for executing this SOA journey and what are all the pieces that a company should consider in a comprehensive SOA program? Or more simply, "What are all the steps needed to get SOA 'right'?" This presentation will address these questions by offering a proven approach that outlines all of the steps (both technical and non-technical) needed to reap the benefits of SOA and maximize adoption. A SOA Center of Excellence is a SWAT team or central architecture team that manages all aspects of SOA delivery and establishes a foundational set of processes and artifacts that will accelerate the transformation to a SOA. It is the focal point for SOA activity and SOA governance within an enterprise. HP will present its roadmap for SOA Centers of Excellence that has been built and tested by numerous customer experiences.
About the Presenter
Dr. Parag Doshi is Chief Technologist & Practice Principal, Application Services Practice HP Services, Consulting and Integration.
Often information integration projects are seen as data-centric projects: we tend to focus on how to map one data set to the other. However, this often results a least common denominator design that loses much of the detail and richness required by the business. In this session we will see how the principle of associative modeling, coupled with a modeling tool designed to support collaboration with the business, can be used to integrate information from disparate sources to a consistent business model that is the super-set of the respective sources. We will see how focusing on semantic integration can streamline the process and result in an information model that better reflects the needs of the business.
About the Presenter
Dan Collins has been involved in data warehousing and business intelligence for over 19 years. His background includes working as product manager and/or designer of data integration middleware, reporting tools, ETL tools, ERP specific migration facilities, metadata management products and EAI platforms. He has performed these roles at Information Builders, iWay and Financial Fusion (a Sybase subsidiary). He is currently Manager of Presales Consulting for the Americas at Kalido, Inc.