It made an IMPACT
by Rick Hugie, April 21
I'm happy to report that I managed to
survive the Impact SOA conference in Las Vegas. It was an incredible event.
I've been to many of these events and this year's Impact was something
special. The tone was set by the opening key note. The CIO of Harley Davidson
kicked off the event by riding a Harley through the MGM Garden Arena onto
the stage to introduce Drew Carey, the MC.
There were Cirque du Soleil performers
and all of Drew Carey's improv cast—including Ryan Stiles—were out doing
skits between speakers. It made an immediate statement that IBM was very
serious about this conference and sparing no expense.
Besides the pomp, I was very impressed
by the content. I've been a witness and participant in the SOA journey
with IBM, from the early days where SOA was most of an ideology. Over the
years the SOA story become more and more clear with concrete implementations,
tools, methodologies and best practices. There were even some major differences
from as recently as last years Impact conference.
The first one is how complete the vision
and message is now. The story is clear from making the business case to
to senior executives on taking an SOA approach right through to post implementation
of monitoring the environment and governance models to maximize the benefits.
The other major difference was the sheer number of customer success stories,
many of which are at a mature state with high ROI and measurable results.
At last years conference there were many client stories, but at this
years conference there were over 200 customer presenters sharing their
success stories.
As I mentioned in a prior blog post,
I was speaking at Impact again this year about Rich Internet Applications
with Portals. The session went fairly well, with a pretty good turnout.
Even though the time slot was late in the day, 5:15 - 6:30, people were
still asking questions and engaged in the discussion. As promised in my
prior post, the presentation is attached below.
I'll post more comments on Impact in
the coming weeks.
