SOA Consortium Releases New Podcast Featuring Ron Schmelzer, ZapThink,
on “SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail”

Needham, MA, USA – June 15, 2009 – The SOA Consortium™ today announced that a podcast and slide deck of the presentation by Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner, ZapThink, on “SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail,” recorded at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington, D.C. are now available. To access the podcast, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-dc-rs. 

Schmelzer began by commenting on the inflexible, unreliable, unpredictable and non-compliant nature of enterprise systems. He then 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. Companies lack the discipline to build durable systems that can meet new business needs for 10 years.

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.

To hear Schmelzer’s advice on applying service-orientation to engineer durable solutions, download the 48-minute podcast and accompanying slide presentation at http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-dc-rs. To read more about this podcast or to share your views, visit the SOA Consortium’s SOA Insights blog at http://blog.soa-consortium.org. 

The next SOA Consortium meeting is in San Antonio, Texas on September 16-17, 2009. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium and attending the meeting should visit the website, http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org. 

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About The SOA Consortium
The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, MegaPractical, NEC Sphere, SPARX Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by OMG.

For more information, please visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/ or email info@soa-consortium.org. 

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