A new SOA year has begun - what will the SOA Santa bring?

Wow, the new SOA year is here - and many cool things are about to arrive. But before looking into the future, let's look back into 2006 - and what happened there.

My first year, living in San Francisco and working within a wonderfull group, envisioning future and creating our next generation products went by - and I must admit it was far better than I thought it'd be.

First, and most important - we delivered SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 - the first major, integrated SOA plattform. Not just integrated, but also with two new key components, the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Rules. Since OOW 2006 we we presented the first public available release, our customers are using it heavily to build their next generation SOA - and according to many of them - they enjoy doing so :D

Also, we signed an OEM agreement with IDS Scheer, to build the ORACLE BPA Suite on top of it. Using Business Process Architect - for the first time Business Processes will make it all the road down to be executable, and all the way back to feed real world data into simulation and continous refinement.

Another also, was the overwhelming amount of SOA related sessions at Oracle Open World, and the great feedback we received. It was a blast, more than 40000 people made the city for one week being red, being Oracle. Elton John played during the big Oracle party, and so on.

Open SOA - www.osoa.org went live - and with it the big players in the SOA market space, to drive next generation, easy to use standards.

So after all what's in for 2007?

While we all work hard on delivering 11g - our next generation SOA infrastructure, based on Service Component Architecture (SCA) and supporting Service Data Objects (SDO) - we expect a patchset for 10.1.3.1 (which will offer a ton of new features, and little fixes here and there).

BPEL 2.0 will see the light of life - after more than 2 years, and the last public review finished, some more polishing needs to happen - and then we are ready to go. With it - BPEL will present a number of long awaited cool features, such as the new variable layout ($inputVariable) and scoped partnerlinks.

Evangelism on SOA will continue to drive the spirit of SOA and help customers adopting to it - I really look forward to even more presence around the globe, and many customers going live on SOA Suite.

Personally for me - it's moving on with my SOA Best practices series on OTN, supporting people around the globe and the OTN forums, doing evangelism on SOA & help creating 11g. More than enough.