The First International SOA Symposium
October 7 and 8 the First International SOA Symposium took place in the Amsterdam Arena (the soccer stadium, home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax). Let me give you a short impression of this event by describing the presentations I attended (providing just a very limited view!).
Thomas Erl (SOA Systems) opened the conference with his keynote “The State of SOA”. Also, he launches two of his new books at this event: “SOA Design Patterns” and “Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA”.
Sandy Carter (IBM) introduced the notion Key Agility Indictors, meant for measuring the agility of an organization (but not being a replacement for Key Performance Indicators!), in her keynote.
Cesare Pautasso (University of Lugano) told us about the differences between REST and SOAP in his presentation “REST vs. SOAP – Making the Right Decision”. I like his conclusion, i.e. “Don’t let it be a discussion on religion”. Always make a well considered choice based on real arguments.
My colleagues Art Ligthart, Jan-Willem Hubbers and I organized a workshop on service identification. Though the number of participants was limited to 30, we ended up with 54 people in the workshop room, and even 30 more waiting outside 
. The participants did a really great job in identifying the services for the insurance company Protector using the current systems and business process decomposition methods. By the way… if you attended the conference, were not able to make it inside and want more information about the workshop, just let me know!
The second day the opening keynote was given by David Chappell (Oracle) telling about the “Future State of SOA”, ending with the notion of the “SOA Grid” (further explained in his next presentation “The Service Grid: How Grid Technology is Shaping the Future of SOA”).
David Wisnosky (Department of Defense) provided the second keynote on “The 3 Main Pillars of the DoD Go Forwards Strategies”. He described very vividly on what to do and what not to do when implementing SOA. In his presentation in the afternoon he spoke about among other service registries and metadata registries.
Some pictures of the event (by the way, if you attended the event and want more pics, please let me know):
Ordina as founding partner of the symposium
The location is a bit unusual
Thomas Erl (SOA Systems) giving his keynote
Sandy Carter (IBM) giving her keynote
Art Ligthart and Jan-Willem Hubbers (Ordina) presenting the new Ordina book on SOA
Me (being one of the reviewers) presenting the Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA book written by Thomas Erl, Anish Karmarkar, Priscilla Walmsley, Hugo Haas, Umit Yalcinalp, Kevin Liu, David Orchard, Andre Tost, and James Pasley.
Lunch!!
Joe McKendrick and Thomas Erl
David Chappell (Oracle) telling us about the SOA Grid
Getting to meet people
Free books!
Relaxing….
Listening to the presentations
I enjoyed the symposium – looking forward to next year’s edition. Thanks!
Hi Linda,
I saw your reply on a blogpost of one of my students. I you want to read more reviews, please take a look at http://wiki.icaprojecten.nl/display/EADPUBL, we went to the symposium with 2 lecturers and 14 students, the wiki contains our reviews.
Thanks for the link Rody!
Hi Linda,
Nice review of the 1st edition. Looking forward to work with you again on the second edition on October 22nd and 23rd in Rotterdam.