BT Summit (Where business matters)

• Business Technology (BT Summit) Summit was held on 23 Sep -24 Sep 2008 at Bangalore. The summit covered four complementary, yet important tracks viz. SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, Virtualization and Enterprise Content Management (ECM). The eminent speakers of the conference brought the insights on how to align the technology with business needs.
  The summit was very well organized in terms of keynote sessions, track based sessions and technology intensive workshops. The Business Technology Expo had different stalls like SalesForce.com, mPower etc. They definitely provided the opportunity for networking, to understand about the products/offerings
  Prominent speakers like Sasa Ana, Peter Coffee, Kiran Datar, Ismael Ghalimi, Otto de Graaf, Tarun Gulati, Chris Harding, Matjaz B. Juric, Robert Marcus, Alan Pelz-Sharpe & others had graced the occasion.
  The summary of some of the sessions are shared below:
  KeyNote Sessions
  The Keynote sessions covered the issues which are of concern to the enterprises. These sessions included
  > Business Transformation vs. SOA Transformation - Can I do Both?
  > Way to Work - Enterprise 2.0
  > Software + Services: Fundamental Shifts in Platform Computing
  > The Drive Towards an On-Demand Platform
  
  The keynote session of Business Transformation vs. SOA Transformation - Can I do Both? was addressd by Manoj Saxena. The summary of the session is to link how business transformation can be achieved through SOA initiative. However, the majority of IT's budget and resources are spent in maintenance leaving little time and resources for IT to be innovative and meet the business demands. In addition, many IT Corporations have adopted SOA in adhoc fashion and achieved some maturity in the technology. The key to aligning the IT objectives with the business objectives is a structured approach. He shared different ways to develop the required capabilities and prioritize the initiatives to create a Business and SOA transformation roadmap.
  Kiran Datar of Cisco spoke on “The Drive towards an On-Demand Platform”. He mentioned that according to Gartner, the annual cost to own and manage software applications can be up to four times the cost of the initial purchase. As a result, companies end up spending more than 75% of their total IT budget just on maintaining and running existing infrastructure and software, companies have accepted this as a cost of doing business. The number of software applications that a company may need is infinite but the resources are finite. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revolution allows companies to subscribe to software applications and have minimal cost of ownership on a usage basis. SaaS solutions are more cost effective than ownership. Thus, companies can spread their IT budget across applications to support their business needs which will contribute to the bottom line. On-demand collaboration is among the leaders in the SaaS platform along with CRM solutions. People want to work together and share data, video & audio with anyone, anywhere, anytime. We are in the “NOW” era of collaboration. . Today’s collaboration solutions also offer a very high level of security and availability. As the environment for collaboration is changing, IT departments are now making collaboration services as part of their overall deliverables.
  The session had given the perspective on how enterprises can bring their cost of IT down by adopting SaaS as strategic solution.
  Peter Coffee spoke on “Code in the Cloud”
  On-demand computing has transformed software, lowering risk and cost while increasing user adoption and customer success. To be successful, an application must be designed for on-demand from the ground-up, including core architectural elements such as multi-tenancy, availability, performance, security, metadata-driven customization, integration via web services, etc. A comprehensive platform should encapsulate core computing services, allowing application developers to focus on innovation and value. Using demos and code examples, Peter Coffee will discuss the technical architecture and developer benefits of a multi-tenant language and a comprehensive cloud-based development experience.
  SOA Track
  The SOA & Webservices track was filled with lots of action. The sessions ranged from SOA Standards, SOA Patterns, Business Process Management, Best practices of SOA. SOA Life cycles, DNA of SOA etc.
  The 2 days were full of knowledge, examples, data, market trends etc. on SOA. The best part was the speakers knew what they were talking about. The speakers were very much willing to give away information and answer queries (offline & online). The SOA menu was filling the hunger of quest of SOA learner be a naive or advanced.
  Summary of some of the sessions are listed below:
  Building a Flexible Enterprise with SOA and BPM by Matjaz B. Juric.
  Matjaz explained how SOA & BPM fits together. He started off his session with executives’ perspective on IT. As per the Gartner/Forbes’ executive survey (2005), around 48% of managers felt that IT hinders change. The reason for that feeling is that IT is not flexible to meet the changes of the business needs. This is where there is a need for SOA to pitch in to make the IT infrastructure as agile to meet the changes of the business needs.
  He cautioned that it is very much vital to have a long term perspective for the SOA projects & the needs of the SOA to be looked at business aspect, technology aspect & organizational aspect. He compared the SOA implementation with respect to traditional software implementation.
  
  Essential DNA for SOA Genesis by Gautam Nadakarni
  Gautam started the session humorously with list of SOA Maixms like replace “EAI” with SOA on your resume. That caught the attention of the audience very well.
  He shared that the main objective of the SOA project should be “Service Orientation”. The session was well structured. He shared insights on SOA vision, principles, Processes, Service oriented Infrastructure. According to him the SOA initiative has 3 phases viz. Service oriented Architecture (SOA), Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI), Service Oriented Processes (SOP). He also drawn the analogy of ITIL guidelines and applied them to SOA lifecycle. Finally he ended up the session with 7 key takeaways of his session for all the audience.
  
  Enterprise Content Management track
  The sessions of Enterprise content management (ECM) ranged from defining what ECM is to how ECM & SOA are linked. Speakers had caught the attention of the audience with very rich information & relevant trends.
  ECM 2.0 by Sridharan Sankaran
  Sridharan exemplified the importance of ECM technologies in the enterprise. The workforce entering the corporation is already well versed with the ECM technologies & expecting the corporate to provide the similar experience. However, enterprises do have their limitations towards the opening all the Web 2.0 technologies to the workforce because of security issues.
  Sridharan gave insights on what are the different technologies involved in ECM 2.0. Few of them are listed as below:
  > Wikis, blogs, rss
  > Web 2.0 clients
  > Personal publishing
  > Guided navigation
  > Text/media analytics
  > Bus process analytics
  > Expertise profiling
  > Virtualized repository
  > Self contained content
  > Native xml everywhere
  According to the speaker, the technology is bringing out opportunities as well as challenges. He has of a opinion that this requires a solid architectural approach to the ECM platform and the glue to connect the business needs with a rich set of applications. He also suggested that there is a need for SAAS enabled ECM platform which could cater to the need of
  > Multi tenancy support,
  > Provisioning services
  > Data, user, full text partitioning
  > Authentication & authorization
  ECM & SOA by Alan Pelz
  The insights of how ECM & SOA relations were shared by Alan Pelz. ECM provides control to the content across the enterprise. (Controls like Security, access, changes, audit trail, associated business processes, compliance, life cycle through to destruction). The content can be distributed across multiple locations/servers. So, providing the control on this distributed content is very complicated. The technologies involved and the architecture of these are very complex. Alan mentioned that the webservices developed to integrate the applications need to be well thought.
  Usually the content in an enterprise has been managed through centralized architecture
  > Centrally controlled & organized
  > Simple processes optimized for local needs
  > Parallel activities
  > Distributed & fragmented policies
  > Various levels of expertise
  However in the globalized enterprise, the content will be distributed. Some of the different ways to achieve distributed ECM are libraries of content, through cluster of services, virtual ECM.
  Some of the ECM Demands of SOA includes
  > Awareness of the location of content items
  > Interacting with identity management protocols & products
  > Real-time bidirectional integration with directory services
  Most of the vendors in the ECM space are already have SOA approach for their products. Alan explained Wipro Technologies’ SOA framework has been very well thought out & he explained how it can meet the needs of ECM demands.
  Alan also gave the insights on SWOT for ECM. According to him, strength is buyers want SOA/ECM. Weakness - SOA is not adopted by everyone, opportunities being common set of standards & alignment with BPM & threat is that vendors of SOA could take away the whole market of ECM.
• Workshops
  There were multiple deep dive workshops were conducted related to ECM, Cloud computing & SOA.
  Selecting the Best ECM System by Alan Pelz was intended to give tips on how to select ECM system that best suits the organization. He shared the hints and tips on selecting an ECM product, best practices for selecting the product & to select the product based on the use case scenarios i.e. objectively assessing the vendor product.
  BPMN to BPEL – Modelling business processes for SOA workshop was covered by Matjaz B.Juric.
  According to speaker, SOA lifecycle starts with business process modeling and continues with process implementation, identification of services, process execution, activity monitoring & optimization.
  He demonstrated how to translate BPMN to BPEL, decomposition of services, to reuse services, to use registry & repository & to execute the process. The IBM & Oracle SOA platforms were used for the workshop.Matjaz demonstrated the indepth knowledge on the subject & practical aspects.BPMN to BPEL - Modelling Business Processes for SOABPMN to BPEL - Modelling Business Processes for SOA

Summary

• The BT Summit gave full perspective on the technologies which are key to transform the business. The sessions were organized very well and master of ceremony had done a wonderful job. Team of SaltMarch Media did a wonderful job in bringing the in depth experience of thought leaders..