SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail

Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink gave a lively talk on SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC.

Schmelzer began by complaining about the inflexible, unreliable, unpredictable and non-compliant nature of enterprise systems. Next, he spoke of the real digital divide – the technology experiences we have as consumers versus at work. This divide is the equivalent of turning the clock back 10 years.

In diagnosing the problem, Schmelzer ruled out bad technologists, bad technology and inadequate investment. In fact, enterprises are quite good at design and development. The problem is not the artistry, but the engineering. We lack the discipline to build durable systems that can meet new business needs for 10 years.

Equally troubling is that current IT practices – large buy and build projects – only satisfy a small portion of business opportunities. Schmelzer describes this as the long tail of un-served business needs. The keys lie in architecture, service-orientation and optimizing this equation: identifying the smallest number of services that enable the largest number of processes in the organization.

Presentation Abstract:
In this talk, ZapThink Managing Partner Ronald Schmelzer will discuss how to advance both the state of SOA adoption and your SOA careers by focusing on where the rubber meets the road: providing effective, efficient, and agile response to mission and business needs without introducing high costs, unpredictable infrastructure, or organizational chaos. Using material from ZapThink's latest Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) training boot camp, Ron will walk attendees through some of the latest best practices on SOA adoption and explain how you can further your business goals and career by doing SOA well.

About the Speaker:

Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink, is a well-known expert in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, and XML-based standards. Ron has been featured in and has written for periodicals, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences and in front of some of the largest businesses in the world.

Ron Schmelzer was the lead author of XML And Web Services Unleashed (SAMS 2002) as well as co-author of Service-Orient or Be Doomed (Wiley 2006) with Jason Bloomberg, due to be released in 2006. Ron has served as the chair of the RosettaNet Cluster 1 Workgroup, working group member of CPExchange, member of the UDDI advisory group, and was a member of the CompTIA Electronic Commerce Standards Board (ECSB). Prior to ZapThink, Ron was founder, CTO, and "ePostle of Partners" of ChannelWave Software, as well as founder and President of VirtuFlex Software, and founder and CEO of VirtuMall, one of the first online eCommerce sites in 1994.

Ron was named "Geek of the Week" in Internet Magazine and was listed in Boston Magazine's Internet Top 40. Ron received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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