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I continue with an overview of the remainder of the IBM SOA Architect summit.

Modeling and methodologies are all good and well. But there is a time and a place for everything. In the talk on SOA in an enterprise architecture, there was a fair bit of real-world experience provided. Practical advice including the fact that standards are useful only if they actually make a difference. A good example of this is the attempt to include a certain standard or development technique into a SOA development only to find out that the requisite skills are not available or that the development technique goes beyond what is ordinarily done in the organization. The most salient point made in the presentation is probably the most important question anyone embarking on the SOA voyage should think about: what is a service?. It’s a lot trickier than one initially thinks…

Model and assemble: business-driven development was probably the most boring of the lot. Modeling is one of those topics that is of less interest to me than actual nuts and bolts. I agree with the speaker: the current state of the art in business process monitoring platforms is certainly not mature. But to determine where SOA can add value, business process monitoring is the only tool to use. What came first: chicken or egg?

Deployment of basic SOA was the topic of the presentation aptly titled Deploy: The SOA operating environment. A good overview of the IBM SOA reference architecture was provided. The reference architecture is IBM’s way of describing the SOA environment and the components required to enable SOA.

The ESB is at the heart of the SOA architecture. It performs the function of routing requests, accepting and converting messages and data streams as well as handling events generated by various components. The concept of the services repository was briefly touched upon, as were composite applications. Find out more in this informative IBM Redbook.

Manage: Managing and monitoring your SOA focused on management of an SOA environment, believe it or not! The rather complex security requirements an SOA environment has is something to consider, especially if legacy applications are introduced as providers of specific services. Federated identity management and global sign-off functionality is important. Having seen numerous SAP implementations, the issues with authorizations and security in a closed environment are already complex enough. There’ll be a fair bit of work to determine the best method of securing any kind of SOA value chain.

The IBM systems agenda was the traditional IBM hardware punt. Extra information on virtualization is always useful.

What would any IT summit be nowadays without mentioning governance. Methodologies, governance and charters were briefly discussed in the presentation on SOA governance.

With sleep fast catching up, Getting started with SOA was mercifully short. IBM is obviously more than able and willing to assist any interested party to start a project to implement SOA.

SOA is a fascinating new trend that will see many existing IT environments change yet again. I can’t help but feel that we’re at the foot of a mountain that will lead many an organization right down into a valley of dispair. There is a lot of uncertainty, and certainly a lot to learn.

My first question to you is: “what is a service?”.