Sandy Carter, IBM VP, SOA, BPM and WebSphere, spoke on the importance of taking a Smart SOA(tm) approach in a Tough Economic Climate, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC.
Carter began by sharing that customers are asking about, and employing, service-orientation and business process management not only to survive the economic crisis, but also to thrive and become more successful when the economic crisis ends. To this point, CEOs are equally concerned with cost optimization and agility. Carter was careful to distinguish cost optimization – re-using services, optimizing processes – from non-sustainable cost cutting.
In addition to the economic climate, Carter spoke of marketplace changes based on technology location and proliferation. There are one billion transistors for each person on earth. One trillion things connected to the Internet. And, by 2010, there will be 30 billion RFID tags embedded into our world. This pervasive connectivity and instrumentation provides innumerable opportunities to smarten our companies, countries and environment.
Interestingly, in each of the Smarter Planet examples Carter cited, such as StatOil’s RFID tagging of blue mussels to quickly identify and stop leaks during oil drilling, the solutions all had SOA at the core. When an attendee called out this theme, Carter shared that SOA has become control point of competitive advantage for companies. If you haven’t deployed yet, now is the time. If you have, now is the time to take your SOA to the next level.
To listen to an audio recording of Carter’s presentation and view the slides go here.
Following her presentation, Carter signed copies of her latest book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0, How to use ANGELS to Energize your Market.
Sandy’s is the second of several podcasts recorded at our March meeting. Previously, we released Dave Linthicum’s podcast on Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing. Next up, a roundtable discussion on How SOA Participates in a Green World.
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