TIBCO iProcess Suite is a suite of application modules built on an open architecture that is designed to provide a complete end-to-end process management solution. It allows organizations to create an IT infrastructure that is based on their business process - their way of doing business. By separating the application logic away from the process layer, it allows the creation of a layer that provides a process abstraction, and removes the processes from the control of applications. This 'process abstraction' layer, the independent process layer, is the key to process flexibility and agility.

Exploring the boundaries between the Enterprise and the Internet, this talk focuses on Architectural approaches from the service pattern, process pattern and event pattern to help SOA practitioners understand topics such as Web 2.0, AJAX, SaaS, Social Networks and how they connect with the Enterprise. The emerging patterns of architecture can enable the savvy architect to empower their IT to embrace an accelerating vision of the network economy.

The success of SOA runs two ways. SOA serves as the catalyst for organizational change, yet an organization must be ready to embrace these new dimensions opened up by SOA. The latest survey data shows most organizations are just starting on their SOA journeys. Why do enterprises set out to build a Service Oriented Architecture, but end up with a 'Service Averse Architecture'? There are many promises being made about the potential of SOA these days, followed by disillusionment as these promises don't pan out. However, SOA is more than a single IT project or even a series of implementations. Rather, SOA represents a long-term change in thinking and management of all aspects of the enterprise. SOA not only decomposes technology into loosely coupled systems, but also decomposes organizations into 'loosely coupled businesses.' This session will look at the latest survey data on ways organizations are embracing service oriented architecture, and how far along the road most are from full-functioning SOA.

A panel of experts and executives from organizations that are leading providers and consumers of technology will discuss trends and important technologies for enterprise and Internet computing. The experts will discuss the role of databases and database technology trends that enhance SOA and Web development. The session will also focus on preferred solutions for architecture and middleware to enable applications and services to access data from SQL and other data sources.

Is the system integrators' vision of 'business without borders' becoming a reality? This panel will examine the 3-way coalescence of Business-to-Business, SOA, and Business Process Management in the direction of a more flexible enterprise.

Green Hat's GH Tester is the essential tool for organizations working with SOA platforms from vendors such as IBM, BEA, Sonic, TIBCO, Software AG and Oracle as well as any JMS or SOAP implementation. The creation of automated, repeatable tests is carried out using an intuitive graphical user interface, achieving the power of a custom-written program in a fraction of the time. User-friendly screens allow the display, creation and manipulation of your message catalogue and comprehensive reports detail the test results. These not only provide information on test success or failure, but also on the performance of the application under test. GH Tester's transport agnostic approach allows users with more than one integration technology to standardize on a single automated testing tool, and, the combined SOA and BPM validation capability provides a means of testing all aspects of their SOA projects, including exception handling and manual processes.

Appistry's flagship product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric, simplifies the process of developing, deploying and managing highly scalable and reliable applications. With Appistry EAF, data- and CPU-intensive software developed using technologies like Java, Spring, .NET or C/C++ can be easily scaled-out across a virtualized 'grid' of inexpensive servers. As a result, Appistry customers such as FedEx, Northrop Grumman and GeoEye are able to quickly and inexpensively bring new capabilities to market with the agility, scale and reliability demanded by their businesses.

Mule is an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Designed to support high-performance, multi-protocol transactions between heterogeneous systems and services, Mule provides the basis for service oriented architecture (SOA). With a standards-based, zero intrusion approach to existing infrastructure and a simplified development model, Mule adapts to your environment and prevents vendor lock-in. The open source model allows organizations to achieve rapid ROI, and open access to source code enables developers to customize Mule to readily meet their needs.

Popular assumptions can often be dangerous. We will start by considering how the many unique architectural characteristics of SOA, such as loose-coupling, can actually be a two-edged sword affecting the requirements, nature and success of many important aspects of the architecture, especially runtime governance. In fact, the success of any SOA requires that one must gain an understanding of the true nature, performance characteristics and availability of the business transactions that flows in real-time through these highly distributed services and their supporting IT infrastructure. Similarly, security and governance usually play a critical role in the proper operation of a SOA. Although one may support these critical SOA functions using many different technologies and standards, there is no doubt that for most users today the popular WS-* standards will play a central role. We will conclude by considering how all of these standards might best work together to solve these real-world problems in your SOA. In the process, we will speculate upon some the strengths and weaknesses in the current Web services stack, the nature of the standards process and what trends might be most relevant to your own future success.

While SOA can deliver dramatic cost reduction of an organization's business operations, it is a complex, multidisciplinary undertaking, and therefore introduces significant risk. This session presents a list of the most important risk factors and ways to mitigate them BEFORE it is too late. The session will be of interest to anyone planning an SOA initiative, primarily CIOs, Technical Managers, Project Directors and Technical Architects.

Magic Software's iBOLT is a code-free business integration suite that allows for customizable and streamlined business processes, integrating them across diverse applications, platforms and databases. iBOLT's out-of-the-box toolset includes more than 50 connectors, adapters, and services that simplify and configure the technologies of integration.

SOA implementations are increasingly reliant on streams of data that are time-critical, reliably delivered and sourced from mixed infrastructures in a highly distributed environment. Data formats, delivery mechanisms, fault tolerance capabilities and stateful semantics embedded in data are often inadequately considered when architecting and implementing large scale real-time SOA applications. This talk will introduce several real-time data-centric technologies that specifically address the challenges of wide-scale, real-time data distribution, as well as how these technologies seamlessly integrate into existing SOA frameworks. Examples will be drawn from military and aerospace applications that are already seeing success with real-time, highly distributed SOA applications.

Designing services well requires intentional application of design strategies and consistent utilization of service oriented principles. In this talk, Kyle Gabhart will explore one such principle of service orientation - the composable nature of services. One thing that distinguishes services from other distributed components is the ability to compose solutions. Service oriented solutions support this by aggregating service calls underneath higher-level services and orchestrating services into business processes. Although most service oriented practitioners will readily admit this is a goal, few realize this goal due to poor service design. This session explores the subject of service composition and provides practical guidance regarding how to design and work with composable services.

Layer 7 Technologies announced it has joined the HP Internet Software Vendor (ISV) Marketplace Referral Program to facilitate the companies' collaboration in the field and accelerate the adoption of joint solutions.

Open source has made significant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments, with a focus on ESB, and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

WSO2 is an open source middleware company founded by pioneers in Web services and of members of the Apache Software Foundation Web services community. WSO2 delivers a new, entirely open source middleware stack that is optimized for Web services and SOA and built on Apache Axis2. WSO2's first products are the WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS) and WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which are built on the WSO2 Web Services Framework. The company maintains operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka.

JBoss, a division of Red Hat, is the global leader in open source middleware software, combining JBoss Enterprise Middleware software with the industry's leading services and tools to provide a better way to transform your business with service-oriented architecture (SOA). Freedom OSS brings an elaborate expertise in SOA to the partnership with JBoss. As a services organization, they collaborate with customers to design an SOA blueprint to fit the customer's needs. When you have an SOA problem, Freedom OSS is the top choice for your complete solution.

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.

Ranked by Gartner as a leader in the Application Infrastructure Software market, Fujitsu helps companies build SOA-enabled BPM applications that can be shared across the enterprise to lower operating costs, accelerate business processes, and react quickly to changing market requirements. Fujitsu's BPM Suite, Interstage Business Process Manager, brings business and IT professionals together to design, simulate, automate, analyze, and optimize business processes. Together with CentraSite, Fujitsu's standards-based SOA registry and repository, Fujitsu helps companies take a process-driven approach to SOA. This top-down approach allows for collaboration on translating real business models into optimized, executable business processes while letting an organization reuse their existing Visio process maps, IT infrastructure and other SOA assets to reduce operational costs and maximize business efficiencies.

ZSL announced its Enterprise 2.0 Computing Framework built on IBM WebSphere sMash and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). ZSL's new Enterprise 2.0 computing framework offerings will enable businesses to protect core legacy system investments while leveraging cutting-edge tools and development languages to streamline programming, processing, enhancements, and integration of new applications.

ProjectLocker announced a partnership with Rally Software in which it will build integrations for Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions. Future enhancements between Rally, Subversion source code management and ProjectLocker's proprietary analytics will help Agile development teams extend their existing enterprise tooling investments, reduce implementation costs and seamlessly unify technical and role-based silos into a collaborative dashboard.

SOA Software and iTKO announced a combined solution for continuous management and quality assurance across the entire design, development and change lifecycle of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) applications. The integrated offering includes iTKO's LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualization suite, and SOA Software's Policy Manager and Service Manager solutions.

Software AG is an independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Their 4,000 global customers achieve measurable business results by modernizing and automating their IT systems and rapidly building new systems and processes to meet growing business demands. Software AG's product portfolio includes best-in-class solutions for managing data, enabling service oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining proven technology with industry expertise and best practices, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses - faster.

SOA is about people as much as technology. This talk will demonstrate how adding a layer of social (or 'Web 2.0') features - things like tags, comments and syndication feeds - to your SOA infrastructure can provide fertile ground to help grow a vibrant and connected community of developers, businesspeople and technologists. We'll show you how a social registry/repository can enable both grass-roots development and CIO-pleasing governance, all with standard REST interfaces. And because we can directly connect SOA components and metadata with the human community creating them, the relationships of both the software and the people can be enriched.

Web Age Solutions is a provider of technology mentoring and education to the Fortune 500. Their 'Preferred Vendor' status with the global leaders is a result of their highly progressive approach to knowledge transfer and relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction. While many of their competitors are just now getting their feet wet with SOA, they have been delivering SOA training and mentoring since 2003. Moving well beyond theoretical discussions of SOA, we have a deep library of practical SOA curriculum backed by hands-on experience.

Layer 7 Technologies announced a collaboration with Sun Microsystems to help secure and govern Web services built using the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Sun customers will be able to purchase Layer 7 products globally through Sun Professional Services.

Savvion announced it will now be providing customers with human-centric process solutions through Savvion's BPM platform and the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). By combining Java CAPS and Savvion BusinessManager, Savvion delivers an environment that supports process automation from conception through enterprise-wide deployment, fostering collaboration between business users, IT architects and developers, regardless of geographic or organizational boundaries.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6, the latest version of its flagship service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business integration software. Sun also released a new master data management (MDM) suite, a high performance and unified solution that gives users a single view of their customer data and helps them more effectively manage customer relationships.

Managing Web Services in production is no easy task. Ensuring that services follow corporate security and SOA governance requirements, monitoring compliance with individual SLAs, preventing one client from degrading the performance of others and ensuring services built today will work in the future are a few of the challenges. Web service virtualization provides a separate layer that isolates business and operational rules, enabling you to quickly configure virtual Web services while enforcing business and operational policies. This services layer augments Web services management (WSM) tools and registries, making all the services in the enterprise more efficient and consistent.

Development of service-oriented environments is an evolutionary process for organizations of all sizes. The architecture and design decisions made by system architects and developers will impact manageability and flexibility of service infrastructures. Efficient management of loosely-coupled services requires implementing practices to enable visibility, flexibility and automation of service operations. Questions to be answered in this session: What architectures are common for service deployment and integration? How can services be built for manageablility? Why is operational visibility essential for SOA management? How does SOA Management fit into SOA Governance?

When Volvofinans last month selected Software AG's CentraSite as its enterprise platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance and metadata management, the company's IT supremo Johan Nordin said 'We've long recognized the business benefits of a more adaptive and reusable IT infrastructure.' Volvofinans had been moving towards an SOA-based IT infrastructure for a number of years, he noted. Nordin is CIO, reporting directly to the CEO, and is also member of Volvofinans Executive Leading Group.

SOA is mostly associated to technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

Yesterday we read the news of B-hive's acquisition by VMware. Also this week Microsoft closed the Kidaro acquisition, which had been announced earlier in the year. Both of these companies participated in SYS-CON's second international Virtualization Conference & Expo last November in San Francisco. This event was also the last conference BEA Systems sponsored, days before their Oracle acquisition news hit the press. PlateSpin is one of the Gold Sponsors of the upcoming 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City. Novell bought the company before this event has even taken place. In the past six months, four out of nine Virtualization Conference sponsors were acquired.

SYS-CON's upcoming '3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo' faculty includes such distinguished speakers as: Al Aghili (Managed Methods), Alan Chhabra (Egenera), Andi Mann (Enterprise Management Associates), Andrew Conte (APC), Andy Astor (EnterpriseDB), Ariel Cohen (Xsigo Systems), Bill O'Conell (IBM), Bob Lozano (Appistry), Bob Quinn (3Leaf Systems), Brian Martin (IBM), Carlo Innocenti Ph.D. (DataDirect Technologies), Chris Shayan (Ashna Samane), Chris Wiborg (Cisco), David Kleidermacher (Green Hills Software), Doc D'Errico (EMC Corporation), Donato Buccella (Certeon), Dror Gill (Ceedo), Etay Bogner (Neocleus), George Pradel (Vizioncore), Geva Perry (GigaSpaces), Gordon Hunt (Real-Time Innovations), Gregory Brail (Sonoa Systems), Greg Lyon (Egenera), Harry Petty (Brocade), Hezi Moore (Reflex Security), Hubert Yoshida (Hitachi Data Systems), Ian Thain (Sybase), Jacek Kruszelnicki (Numatica Corporation), Jeremy Geelan (SYS-CON Media), Jerry Melnick (Marathon Technologies), Joe McKendrick (WebServices.org), Johan Nordin (Software AG), John Goodson (DataDirect), John Senor (iWay Software), JP Morgenthal (Avorcor), Julian Weinstock (Desktone), Keith Swenson (Fujitsu), Ken North (Computing, LLC), Kenon Owens (VMware), Kevin Epstein (Scalent Systems), Koen Aers (Red Hat/JBoss), Kurt Daniel (Parallels), Kurt Ziegler (SIMtone), Kyle Gabhart (Web Age Solutions), Mark Davydov Ph.D. (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Mark Hapner (Sun Microsystems), Mark Milligan (VirtualLogix), Matt George (Fidelity Investments), Michael CareyPh.D. (BEA Systems), Michael Gorman (Whitemarsh Information Systems), Mike Pizzo (Microsoft), Miko Matsumura (Software AG), Nikita Ogievetsky (Morgan Stanley), Parviz Peiravi (Intel), Paul Lipton (CA), Paul Vasquez (VMware), Peter Manca (Egenera), Phil Morris (Sun Microsystems), Pierre Fricke (Red Hat / JBoss), Ravi Gururaj (VMLogix), Rich Lechner (IBM), Rich Schreiber (Nastel Technologies), Richard Mark Soley (OMG), Rick German (Stoneware), Robert Steward (DataDirect), Ron Williams (Tivoli Software), Sean Derrington (Symantec), Shai Fultheim (ScaleMP), Simon Crosby (Citrix), Stefanos Damianakis (Netrics), Stephen Herrod (VMware), Stephen Pollack (PlateSpin), Tom Bishop (BMC Software), Ursula Sinkewicz (Fidelity Investments), Victoria Livschitz (Grid Dynamics), Yakov Fain (Farata Systems), Zoran Cakeljic (Virtual Iron).

I'll be speaking at the SOA World Conference in NYC this Monday on using rich Internet applications as service consumers in SOA architecture. As the conference faculty member, I can invite a small number of people to attend it for free (Golden Pass). If you'd like to use this offer, just use the coupon code 'speakerguestVIP' (it's case sensitive) on the following registration page. If you have any RIA-related questions, just stop by at the FARATA Systems booth outside the keynote hall. and let's talk. I'll be wearing jeans and black t-shirt with white lettering FARATA.

JNetDirect provides software products for improving their customer's connectivity, integration, management and security to their data resources. Products include JDBC drivers, Business Intelligence, Database Management, Disaster Recovery/Backup solutions and Password Management applications. Below is a brief overview of some of these software applications. JDBC Drivers - Since 1999, JNetDirect database drivers have set the industry standard for performance and stability. Their JDBC drivers are deployed worldwide -- in virtually every conceivable Java configuration -- giving organizations unparalleled connectivity to their critical data sources.

MQSoftware delivers business transaction assurance, business service monitoring, middleware management applications, and enterprise application integration products to help customers align IT operations and investments with their business applications. Working with BEA , BMC Software, HP, IBM, Oracle, and TIBCO Software, MQSoftware solutions provide a complete range of real-time transaction assurance and application services performance and availability management backed by comprehensive reporting and supported with powerful tools built for multiplatform infrastructures enabling precision control of customer service and cost-control.

Layer 7 Technologies is a provider of SOA security and governance infrastructure for next generation service oriented and Web oriented integrations. The SecureSpan family of XML appliances and gateway software addresses the security, performance management and operational governance issues associated with deploying and maintaining production Web services.

Nastel is a recognized market leader in providing solutions for application performance monitoring and management. Nastel's solutions empower IT teams to consistently assure high performance and availability of business applications. Nastel's AutoPilot Suite of software rapidly identifies, resolves and prevents costly performance bottlenecks and failures by providing visibility into performance of critical business processes relying on SOA and middleware infrastructure. Through Nastel's AutoPilot suite and a vast array of plug-ins (ranging from Java applications, WebSphere MQ and WMB, TIBCO EMS, ESB and J2EE platforms, such as WebSphere Application Server, WebLogic, JBoss, Oracle 10g, etc.), IT and Application Support teams can control and see performance bottlenecks in parts of the SOA and EAI infrastructure that they can't ordinarily see. Our clients include some of the world's largest banks, financial institutions, retail chains and insurance providers. Nastel, founded in 1994, is headquartered in New York, has offices in the U.S. and Europe and a growing network of resellers and partners around the world.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) can deliver tremendous value in flexibility, adaptability and cost savings. But SOA environments are complex by definition, with lots of loosely coupled components and a potentially vast combination of platforms, software, databases, applications and networks. One of the biggest challenges inherent in realizing the benefits of SOA is effectively managing all of these diverse components to ensure the high availability and performance of the applications running in them to meet crucial Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This session will explore Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines and offer practical insights into how CEP can be leveraged to enable rapid real-time problem correction and predictive problem prevention that is vital to successful SOA implementations.