Realtime Enterprise Architecture: How SOA Can Use and Benefit from Active EA Models
Ralph Hodgson, Executive Partner, TopQuadrant
To support implementation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), an enterprise architecture needs to be more than simply a pure management-centered IT portfolio and business alignment activity. In addition, an EA needs to become a runtime consultable model. Ontology-based EA models enable SOA implementations by providing an active registry of business capabilities. Developing services brings new challenges for specification and design. SOAs need more intelligent registries of services. Reusable services need to be described in discoverable ways. We advocate a capability-based approach. A service needs to be “knowable” in the context of what it will do for the business. This knowledge is provided by the enterprise architecture. For a service to be trusted and reused, knowledge of who is using it and how well it is performing is needed. The EA captures this knowledge as a service of the realtime EA.

Securing XML: Case Studies from the Insurance Industry
Dr. Tony Palmer, Senior Solution Architect, Vordel
XML is becoming the de facto business document interchange language for the Internet. Technologies such as SOAP and EBXML have been developed within the XML framework. Digital security standards and techniques are now being applied to XML, and to "business webs" built using XML and Web Services.
This presentation discusses these initiatives and the issues being encountered when applying security principles of confidentiality and non-repudiation to XML. Drawing on practical experience in Vordel projects, this presentation looks at how Web Services can be applied in the insurance industry to provide for improved secure partner and customer integration for the delivery of products and services.

Stories from the Field: Adoption of SOA and Web Services
Chris Haddad, Consulting Practice Manager, Burton Group
Web service standards and products have matured and the benefit of SOA extolled, but is 2005 the year for mainstream companies to fully adopt SOA and Web services? How do organizations start planning, minimize risk, and properly set expectations? Chris Haddad will review the decisions made by your peers when prioritizing architecture components, adopting specification standards, selling SOA to business managers, and creating delivery roadmaps. He’ll present the challenges and issues raised when considering organizational competency as well as the culture, service governance, development processes, component selection, and infrastructure financing, too.

.NET/J2EE Interoperability: Integration Strategies, Patterns, and Best Practices
Laurence Moroney, Senior Architect, Mainsoft
The job of an architect is seldom easy. When it comes to requirements and constraints around deployment hardware, life can get even more difficult. With the popularity of .NET amongst front end developers, and J2EE amongst middleware and back end developers, architects face difficult choices. Should one platform predominate, or should the complexity of making the two work together be attempted? Web services can—but seldom do—help in integrating these systems, because of further complexity around interoperation. Add management requirements to the mix, and architects have a major headache keeping everything together that delivers projects on time and within budget.

In this session, we will discuss the phases of a typical large scale system and the particular challenges that an architect and development team will meet in implementing a mixed architecture (fault management, configuration management, accounting, performance management, and security management). We’ll look at the technologies that enable mixed mode systems to communicate, including the Enterprise Service Bus, EAI applications such as BizTalk, and Web services, as well as technologies such as Mono and Visual MainWin for J2EE from Mainsoft that can ease the development process and dramatically simplify the production environment.

Panel : Successful SOA Migration: User Experiences and Best Practices
Moderated by Chris Haddad, Consulting Practice Manager, Burton Group
Learn how to approach service oriented architecture (SOA) management from a project-based level while still allowing room for future expansion and incremental growth to an enterprise-wide SOA. Get valuable insight into how SOA management can help organizations ease the complexity of moving toward a loosely coupled environment. Learn how to move from project-based Web services to an enterprise-wide SOA; real customer challenges and solutions for SOA and Web service deployments; and more. Next, take an in-depth look at the services network approach to SOA and identify the myriad other approaches chief architects are faced with for building out their enterprise SOAs, highlighting both their capabilities and downfalls.

Agile Enterprise Architecture: Practical Methods
Finbarr Joy, CTO and founding member, UPCO
Learn practical techniques for addressing the key challenges facing enterprise architects in today?s business environment: supporting urgent, parallel business initiatives while maintaining effective architecture governance; defining a stable, maintainable road map for the delivery of an adaptive, evolutionary, and cost-effective platform architecture; and aligning architecture with the business to enhance the competitive stature of the organization and deliver measurable business benefit. Using an agile architecture life-cycle development example, you'll see how to apply repeatable techniques that provide best practices for delivering cost-effective, robust, business-enhancing systems. Case studies will illustrate how key frameworks can be combined to address the complete EA ecosystem: The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) defines the target and ensures enterprise governance. Agile techniques and DSDM accelerate the integration and development of the architecture through project workstreams, while .NET and J2EE Platform products combine with open source frameworks for the establishment of contemporary SOA infrastructures.

EA Theory and Practice – A Message from the Front
Roger James, Chief Consultant, Telelogic Popkin BV
How do we get from attractive stories to useful implementations? The path to a successful enterprise architecture is strewn with all kinds of challenges. This presentation examines a number of them, drawing on experiences in the field and referencing them to theory. For example, what are the “musts” and what are just nice to have? FAQs, can I do this in my organisation? Isn’t it an awfully large investment? What are the returns? Getting buy-in. Back to basics: the old story of understanding needs and balancing short-term requirements with long-term goals. We'll look at the importance of a proper model, a review of EA techniques used, and the essentials of implementing them through real-world examples.

Software Factories: Driving the Evolution of Software Development Methods
Jeromy Carriere, Senior Architect, Microsoft
A software factory is a development environment configured to support the rapid production of a specific type of application through a custom collection of domain-specific languages organized by a graph of viewpoints. In this session we'll take a look at software factories, which make up an effort underway at Microsoft to evolve beyond the universal, one-size-fits-all approach to constructing, deploying, and managing software. By introducing patterns of industrialization, software factories promise to drive the evolution of software development methods and change the character of the software industry.

Software Factories in the Enterprise
Gunther Lenz, Program Manager for Software Platform Technologies, Siemens Corporate Research
This session will examine the use of the Microsoft proposed approach to model-driven development—Software Factories—in the real world. Discover the promise of model driven development and learn how this technique, combined with Software Factories, address some of the problems we face in today’s software development. Find out what current state of Software Factories and see how and what parts of this new methodology Siemens is using and planning to use to stay ahead of the competition.

Aspects that will be discussed include agile development, model driven development, reuse of existing assets, Software Factories, and viewpoints of system. The attendees will walk away with an in-depth understanding of Software Factories, its current state and its promise for enterprise development in the future.