BEA World 2006: Beijing Day 2

Bookmark Blog Post

	del.icio.us
	Digg
	DZone
	Furl
	Reddit

Bill Roth's Blog | December 13, 2006   8:02 PM | Comments (0)

BEA World Beijing is going very well. The sessions are packed and there is a lot of interest from the attendees. Even our Open Source panel was nearly full yesterday. We announced several things today, including the release of the Technical Preview of WebLogic Server 10 and WebLogic Workshop 10, and the latest WebLogic SIP server, and a virtualization announcement.

After the Think Liquid video, the keynotes for Day 2 started out with emcee Sicheng Yu giving an overview of the day.

Mark Carges

This first talk of the day was by Mark Carges, EVP and GM of the Business Interaction Division. Mark started out with a review of of the progress we've made in this last year. He started by reminding the audience about the difference between application infrastructure, like WebLogic, and service infrastructure, like AquaLogic and why they are separate, distinct and both necessary for SOA. He then talked about our acquisitions of Plumtree, Fuego and Flashline. Last year, he recalled, that the theme was "moving from Pilot to Production". This year we've moved to "from Production to Payoff". This shows the consistent progress be has been made since we first started talking about SOA in 2003. He reviewed all the progress we've made in the tools area, and then talked about our work in WebLogic Real-Time and virtualization. Our virtualization story starts with a hypervisor, like VMWare, and JRockit. Since Java is very nearly an operating system, the OS itself is redundant. Our new WebLogic Server-VE allows you to run WebLogic server on top of a hypervisor, without an intervening operating system and should be available in the first half of 2007.

The next section of Marks talked about was Business Transformation and Optimization. He made the pint that Service Infrastructure factors out complexity and support re-use of services. His first point was that the discussion around SOA is shifting to one of Business Processes. To be clear, BPM is more than just orchestration. In fact, you have to start thinking about business processes a a service. When you do this, the benefits of SOA, (flexibility, scalability, agility) start applying to business process. We also announced the AquaLogic BPM Collaboration Edition. Mike Stamback came up to help Mike with a demo. Mike started out with a demo of the BPM studio which shows how to build out both system and human workflows. Mike then showed AquaLogic Enterprise Repository console, and showed how AL-BPM can pull processes out of the repository. He also showed the repository navigator, which is a very cool realtime viewer of what is in the repository.

Mark then talked about what SOA 360 is. It encompasses all of BEA's product families, and core services. Key to this is the microServices Architecture, which will allow a more componentized approach to BEA's product so customers can use only the parts they need. Mark showed a prototype appliance which has the core AquaLogic Data Service Platform on a USB drive and running on an appliance. Mark then made the point that SOA is defined by multiple people. They tend to fall into 4  roles: Developer, Architect, IT Operations manager and the Business Analyst. He then talked about Workspace 360, which is the role-specific set of tools that enable all roles in an SOA environment to come together and collaborate on the same information, but translated into language they can understand.

Mark then talked about how the emergence of Wikis, MySpace, and other collaboration and communication sites could be applied to the enterprise. He called these "situational applications". Mike Stamback came back up and showed a demo on how a sales rep could create a an application in their own Workspace by adding and dragging and dropping just the content and tools they need to use to get a particular job done. Mike showed how BEA's products will help enable the business version of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0. This is a term originally defined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard.

Gerry Lim, HP

Then we heard a talk by Garry Lim, Strategic Business Partner Manager for HP, talked about his view on next generation enterprise, what they call the Adaptive Enterprise. The key design principles of Adaptive Enterprise are: Simplification, Standardization, Modularity and Integration. He then discussed how HP has applied these principles to improve their own IT organization.

Bruce Graham

Our head of Professional Services, Bruce Graham, then gave his yearly talk on the state of SOA and how to deliver it. Bruce is the principal author of our SOA domain model, and its our leading thinker on how to deliver SOA. More information on the SOA domain model, shown below, can be found at the BEA SOA site.

Bruce is a great speaker and always ties in interesting analogies. In tis talk, he likened the SOA journey to remodelling a house. He related his experience in remodelling his house to building out an SOA. He first pointed out that we have been speaking about SOA since 2003. He then presented some statistics which shows how more and more companies are moving to SOA. You can find this data in the material on the SOA site, referenced above. Bruce mentioned that SOA requires 3 kinds of leadership

• Operational Leadership
• Architectural Leadership
• Developmental Leadership

Bruce then shared a couple of customer examples where BEA has delivered real value to customers through their engagement of BEA Professional Services, including a very large European Financial Services company.

The CTO panel

I hosted the CTO panel, with:

• Larry Cable, Chief Architect, WebLogic Platform (Role: Developer)
• Theo Beack, Deputy CTO (Architect)
• Annie Shum, Deputy CTO (Business Analyst)
• Zhou Yi, Director of Business Solutions, BEA Asia/Pacific Region (IT operations)

We discussed how WorkSpace 360 and microServices Architecture are relevant to the role that they were representing. We also discussed our virtualization, and its impact on an IT organization.

The day finished off with Sicheng Yu surprising the audience with a pop quiz, and handed out some prizes.

Comments