Making Sense of SOA Blog : HP Software Universe

Showcase your SOA Success -- Call for Papers -- HP Software Universe EMEA

kellyemo — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:23:00 GMT

HP Software Universe in Europe this year comes to Germany. Hamburg, Germany to be exact, during December 15-18, 2009. The timing and venue will allow attendees and speakers to enjoy the festive holiday atmosphere and collaborate with peers and HP Software SOA experts and executives.

While December sounds like a long time away, it's a relatively short three months and we are collecting abstracts now. We are accepting speaking abstracts of two types:

Business Abstracts: To focus on customer successes with HP software and best practices that are returning real results to the business -- In terms of SOA, success stories with real ROI, best practices for effecting organizational change and process improvements and other aspects of SOA adoption that are returning business results

Technical Abstracts: Use cases, implementation success stories, tips and tricks and other areas of interest to the technical stakeholders and potential users of SOA solutions.

Tell your story! Collaborate with your peers and enjoy the event! -- submit abstracts at this link here by September 4th, 2009

What’s needed now -- Pragmatic SOA with measurable results – in action at HP Software Universe

kellyemo — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:07:00 GMT

I think the industry has had enough of espousing the academic promise of SOA at this point. With economic pressures mounting, what we need to see are real results from pragmatic SOA adoption. The good news is that we are seeing real examples of measurable SOA success in action more and more frequently. Next week is HP Software Universe in beautiful Vienna, Austria. HP is planning a roster of speakers on the subject of SOA that are reflecting this theme. In particular, there is a focus on SOA Governance, which is proving to provide the guidance and discipline IT needs to ensure SOA stays on track. I plan to blog on the insights from this event shortly. However, to pique your interest, here are some of the planned sessions: On Tuesday, December 9^th, the Austrian Ministry of Finance will be speaking on adopting an IT Governance approach for SOA. Also on Tuesday, Telecom Italia will be sharing how they established a framework for service quality and reliability through SOA Governance. HP’s Tim Hall will be speaking on why SOA Governance is necessary to effectively navigate the SOA journey on Wednesday, December 10^th. Also on Wednesday you can hear from HP and one of our partners, Alcatel-Lucent, on how to establish secure SOA Governance for compliance. No flashy “SOA will save the world and slice your toast” presentations… just pragmatic, how-to presentations that will share how SOA and SOA Governance best practices will enable IT to achieve faster return on their SOA investments and keep the SOA train on the track. Stay tuned for the insights from this event. Also, if you missed the HP and IDC webcast last month that covered customer-experience-based best practices for successful SOA adoption, I encourage you to listen to the replay here.

Recent SOA best practice gems from HP SOA Customers – or more than lost wages comes from attending HP Software Universe in Las Vegas

kellyemo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:34:00 GMT

I drew the lucky straw to be a track manager at HP Software Universe. This meant I was tagged to organize all the sessions at HP Software Universe for our SOA track . The positive side of the administrivia was that in the process, I had the opportunity to review and hear some great presentations from our SOA customers who are making the journey towards effective SOA transformation. Here are some of the quips and gems that stood out for me: 1. One customer mentioned how for their organization, SOA is a tool within an Enterprise Architecture: The key message here is that you never do SOA for “SOA’s sake”. It’s a tool to help you achieve an architectural objective: agility, re-use, efficiency.

If you want to dig into this topic more, there is some interesting writing about SOA and EA here

2. One needs clear SOA transformation metrics to measure success: What is your SOA measured against? For one key customer, the clear metrics are 1) standards conformance and 2) business agility. Business agility is defined as the ability to see new business intentions, realize business changes and make improvements quickly.

To hear more about measureable benefits of SOA check out Tim Hall’s podcast

3. Don’t be surprised that one of the largest adoption hurdles is that SOA is fraught with “charge back challenges” -- In order for a group to adopt SOA it must be cheaper for the potential service consumer than to do it themselves. (This should be obvious) 4. How to manage versions effectively in a SOA? A best practice is to establish a time-based contract between service consumer and provider – allows the service provider to get consumers onto new versions, otherwise they will never move. 5. My favorite -- How to entice project teams to adopt SOA? Show them how SOA will grow their kingdom and make them a bigger king – appeal to ego, create a buzz – the more groups that use the service, the more successful the service provider, or the bigger the "kingdom". 6. Sometimes silos are not a dirty word. One customer started building out SOA in silos and is now connecting them when the organization has matured enough to handle it – the goal, build initial focused success, gain people buy-in, then expand scope 7. And since there are two sides to every story, that said, some silos must be broken from the get-go. For example, to have success in attaining SOA quality testing that works—you must have collaboration between development and QA – services change continuously during design, requirements definition, development and testing and dev and QA must have a dynamic feedback loop to get a positive result. 8. Finally a good quote ”you need SOA governance but it can’t be bureaucratic” Governance should make SOA easier not put up roadblocks. As the cliché goes..for many of these customers the carrot is proving more effective than the stick.