SOA is Dead?!?! Then, What are these Companies doing?

Mark Herring, Vice President, Software Infrastructure Marketing, Sun Microsystems spoke of SOA’s purported death, real-world customer implementations and trends, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC.

In dispelling the notion that SOA is dead, Herring shared customer success stories from telecommunications, automotive manufacturing, government and healthcare. Common to each example, was the need to solve a specific business problem in a tight time constraint, rather than taking on a grand SOA challenge.

This mindset shift, from SOA as world hunger solver to SOA principles being applied to specific business challenges, is critical in the evolution of SOA, which Herring describes as Simple SOA. Organizations need to simplify at the technology layer, in the form of simple APIs and lightweight infrastructure, and in project delivery techniques, from perfection to good enough.

In respect to technology layer simplification, Herring advised attendees to adopt open source, investigate WOA and cloud services for service definition and implementation practices, consider cloud computing and find a trusted partner.

Presentation Abstract:
Some industry observers have noted that SOA is dead while others contend that it lives stronger than ever. Mark will provide his insights around the evolution of SOA over the past 10 years and its march into the future. He will discuss how SOA is being used to solve some of the industry's biggest technology challenges and how it will continue to deliver business value and transformation in a complex IT environment.

About the Speaker:

Mark Herring, Vice President Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems

As Vice President of Software Infrastructure Marketing, Mark Herring drives Portfolio Management, Business Development, and Strategic Marketing for Sun's market-leading Identity Management, Business Integration, and Application Platform offerings. This includes the widely adopted GlassFish application server. Mr. Herring is an accomplished Marketing Executive with over 15 years experience in the industry.

Mark has held various senior management positions in Software and Services Product Marketing Organizations at Sun Microsystems Inc. Prior to this position he served as Senior Director for Cloud computing offering (network.com) and Sun's Office productivity Suite, OpenOffice.org.

Mark Herring joined Sun in 1999 as a result of Sun's acquisition of Forte Software. At Forte, Mark ran Product Marketing and the Web Channel. Prior to joining Forte, he held positions such as Product-Marketing Manager for Oracle's development tools, and has served as an IS consultant, and Project Manager for a major International Bank.

Mr. Herring holds a B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Witwaterstrand of South Africa.

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