June 23, 2008 7:30-8:20am

It seems that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to be this year's hot buzzword, rather than a well-defined, meaningful and valuable part of the Enterprise Architecture landscape. Before the term fades away completely, perhaps we should agree what's valuable about the move to SOA and how to make the leap, and make the leap valuable. OMG's SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts; and the OMG itself is making headway on modeling standards for services (as opposed to yet another set of standards for moving bits around wires).

Richard Soley is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Object Management Group, Inc. (OMG) and Executive Director of the SOA Consortium. As Chairman and CEO of the OMG, Dr. Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the world's largest consortium of its type. He joined the nascent OMG as Technical Director in 1989, leading the development of OMG's world-leading standardization process and the original CORBA specification. In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and later the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). He also led the effort to establish the SOA Consortium in January 2007.

June 24, 2008 11:00-11:45am

As SOA rapidly becomes the standard for enterprise architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before. Due to the vital role that data plays both in business and systems operations, database architects, information specialists, data integration experts, and anyone responsible for data persistence in an organization are increasingly being called upon to contribute to their organization?s SOA initiatives ? whether or not this was intended at the onset. In this presentation, we will review the technologies, best practices, and patterns that are shaping the way we utilize enterprise data.

John Goodson is the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies. He is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction and long-term corporate strategy. Goodson brings significant technical and business leadership to a company that's been a consistent innovator of multi-platform data access middleware. Joining DataDirect in 1992 as an engineer, he has since held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support and marketing. He is a well known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert and for more than 10 years has worked closely with Sun and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC and ADO.

June 24, 2008 8:20-8:50am

Ken North is a consultant, software developer, author, speaker, industry analyst, and company founder. His software technology expertise has spanned the mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer and Internet eras. Ken teaches Expert Series seminars and is the publisher of SQLSummit.com, WebServicesSummit.com and GridSummit.com. Ken was Contributing Editor for Internet Computing, Web Techniques and Dr. Dobb's Journal. He wrote the "Database Developer" column for Web Techniques and Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook and was XML and Web Services Editor for Dr. Dobbs Journal. North has consulted, spoken at conferences and taught seminars in North America, South America, Asia and Europe. He's served as conference chair for LinkedData Planet, NextWare, and the XML DevCon conferences in Europe and North America. Prior to founding Resource Group, Inc. in 1981, he held management and software engineering positions with TRW and Computer Sciences Corporation. He founded Ken North Computing (www.kncomputing.com) in 1997.