Ross Altman, CTO, Business Integration, Sun Microsystems kicked of the SOA Consortium’s December meeting in Santa Clara by leading an interactive discussion with attendees on SOA myths, misunderstandings and realities.
In lieu of a traditional presentation, Ross promoted conversation by stating a myth, sharing his point-of-view and then inviting meeting attendees to support, augment or refute the myth and/or his arguments. Key concepts in the SOA myths discussed included business IT alignment, business integration, modular development in standalone applications, and governance investment in systemic and opportunistic applications.
In respect to SOA & business-IT alignment, attendees spoke to developing successful, responsibility based, relationships between business and IT, as well as the importance of business contracts in ecosystems dependent upon the cooperation of multiple parties.
Ross’s depiction of service-oriented versus casual development as mapped to systematic versus opportunistic applications garnered the most conversation. The root of the discussion focused on the degree of management investment required for services underlying ‘run the business’ versus ‘mash-up’ applications. This conversation unearthed interesting examples of business and mission capabilities dependent on stable and accurate data, but delivered via mash-ups.
In closing, Ross offered a final thought all heartily agreed upon, “We are not paid to write code, we are paid to deliver systems”.
To listen to an audio recording of Ross’s presentation and view the slides please go here.
This is the first of several podcasts to be released from our Santa Clara meeting. Next up, Harvinder Kalsi on Cisco's internal SOA initiatives.
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