Coming back from Gartner's SOA Summit and heading out to Europe

for the last days we have been at Gartner's SOA Summit, to show our new SOA Suite and discuss the latest trends on SOA and Integration.

Two sessions, of the many I attended, left me thinking on SOA and where we go from here.

Darrell Plummer, Gartner Analyst, held a How to workshop on creating SOA applications, which turned out great.. He fostered a broad discussion in the audience, on what methodologies to use, what a service really is - beyond WSDL, and so forth. A nice metric: out of 15 slides he wanted to show, he showed 5 :D (the rest of the time went into discussion)

and the Chief Architect of Eskom, talked about SOA and his experiences in South Africa - about a company, that adapted to agility, about key stakeholders, and the value of SOA. Overall - SOA is about humans - two thumbs up.

After being home for two days - I'll head to Europe today night (yes on LH 459, Kranich) - for JavaPolis, and to visit customers. Getting the chance to speak at JavaPolis 2006 is a great opportunity to evangelise on standards based SOA - and also that we got a slot for the university part.

Hugo Brand (from our EMEA PM team), Demed Lher (OEMS/ESB PM) and me will talk about Pragmatic SOA, and how you can build composite SOA applications today.

So if you are around, come by to get a 3 hour, intense, and interactive how to session - or just to say hello :D