Monday, September 25, 2006

Sidenote: BEA World and SLA

I didn't get a chance to post last week, primarily because much of the week was divided between the usual POC planning scramble and attendance/exhibiting at BEAWorld2006 in San Francisco. I took notes from some of the Wed. morning keynotes, and I thought I'd share the biggest observations here.

Mark Carges, Executive Vice President, Business Interaction Division, spent an hour talking a little about JRocket and WebLogic RealTime, and a lot about Business Process Automation and Enterprise Service Buses. His primary focus seemed to be to introduce BEA into the "Process as a Service" space, as well as an interesting focus on the on-line, ad-hoc collaboration space (aka "Web 2.0"). They had some cool WIKI/forum/identity tagging tools, for instance. Check their website for BEA Enterprise 2.0 and Workspace 360 if you want to know more.


The "expert panel" discussion included Rob Levy, BEA CTO; Cliff Booth, VP of Enterprise Architecture; Paul Patrick, VP and Chief Architect of Aqualogic; Larry Cable, Chief Architect of WebLogic; and Annie Shum, VP and SOA "visioneer".

The best thing to come out of this discussion was the observation that SOA and BPA are driving organizations to involve their operations groups much earlier in the development/deployment game. The primary reason seems to be the need for innovative infrastructure planning to support dynamic needs. Sound familiar?

I even asked at a later "SOA Reality Check" session where the featured BEA customers saw operations in their development/deployment cycle, and both were very adamant that they are now being forced to consider infrastructure much earlier in the game, not because they need to acquire hardware for each new service, but precisely because it is too expensive to do so.

All in all, a good show. Still a year or two away from SOI and SLA dominating the conversation, but signs that things will get there.

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