BEA World SF 2007: Day 2 Half-time report

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Bill Roth's Blog | September 12, 2007  11:30 AM | Comments (3)

Day 2 of the show started out with a recap of Day 1 by Rosanne Saccone, and the hall was nearly packed with customers, BEA people and a odd assortment of Oracle product manager hoping to learn something about SOA.  She introduced Paul Patrick, BEA's Chief Architect.

Paul Patrick, Chief Architect, A New Approach to Infrastructure

Paul's talk was about a new way to put infrastructure together, and the need for Dynamic Business Applications. His main theme was "change has to be easier" and I couldn't agree more. As a result, we have to think of things in a different way. He introduced the notion of a "Service Fabric". His main topics are:

• Enterprise Infrastructure Today
• Infrastructure as a Fabric
• The Future

He reiterated a common theme on the need for Application Infrastructure and Service Infrastructure. We have talked about how Application Infrastructure as a practice like building architecture, and Service infrastructure as city planning. But the analogy breaks down, because you do not move from buildings to cities, but rather from buildings to neighborhoods. The notion of a service neighborhoods, which form before cities, often grow, and grow together.

He then talked about things he has seen with customers. He pointed out that often, a process of organic aggregation happens, as service neighborhoods grow together. We need a way to make sure this happens in an orderly way.  Paul them made a provocative statement.

Plugging services to the Service Fabric should be as simple as plugging a computing into the network.

The vision of the Service Fabric is a multi-layer mesh. It consist of several layers:

• Hosting layer
• Service Network Layer
• Business Process Layer
• User interaction layer

The hosting layer is the foundation contains:

• Container-independent hosting engine
• Multiple Containers
• Virtualization
• United Management
• United Security

The service network layer consists of:

• Discovery
• Binding
• SLA
• Routing
• Dynamic Provisioning

The Service network does the following:

• Implements the streets
• Content based routing
• Equivalent to today's Enterprise Service Bus

The business process layer is about orchestration and consists of:

• Business logic
• Process engine
• Multiple models
• Optimal service choice
• Dynamic re-optimization
• Monitoring/dashboards

The user interaction layer contains:

• Presentation Logic
• Role-adaptive
• Device-adaptive
• Context-adaptive
• User-modifiable
• Learning
• Social Computing

Paul then began to muse about the future

• It has to be simple
• Discovery has to be simple (i.e. the wireless access model).
• Real drag-and-drop enterprise application composition
• Reliability, availability, scalability and performance as never before
• Inter-enterprise integration through fabric :superhighways"

Jeff Marshall, CIO, Kohl's Stores

After a brief video, Jeff came on and discussed Kohl's rapid growth. 10 year ago, they had 200 stores and now they have almost 1000. He also talked about the corporate goals, which included net income % improvements, which are due to operating efficiencies. But the business is becoming more complex, with new brands and new products, some of which may draw customers away from existing brands. His key challenges are:

• Competitive Environment
• Rapid Growth
• Increasing Business Complexity and Speed
• Demand for Data:

• Sharing of information across departments
• Complex business logic
• Diversity with evolving technology
• Demand to integrate with legacy silo application

As a result of these challenges, IT must transform it self. They have done so with a number of organization changes, as well as a strategic partner selection process, and better cross-organization process organization.

They key transforms include:

• Architecture - enterprise wide, SOA.
• Process
• People

He came from a data networking background, and they OSI model of networking, where one layer is isolated from the rest, is a model he's applied to their corporate infrastructure and his SOA.

He made an interesting observation. Business processes are tied to an organizational structure, which is tied to the corporate culture. Key to their success has been a metrics driven approach. The then described some of their logistics and supply chain issues. Their challenges are best described as right product, right store, right time, at the right price. It all adds up to massive logistics process issues. They have also been focused on having a consistent experience across all channels, like in-store, web, and mobile.

He also included some nice words about BEA saying "There a good partner, tenacious, and their stuff works." (Full disclosure, I am exec sponsor for Kohl's)

IT has been in transformation itself and the company across the board including:

• Marketing analytics
• Credit Systems
• Marketing/CRM
• Multi-Channel systems

Comments

• Hi Bill! Is there a report on the 2nd half of day2? I would like to read a summary of Bruce's keynote. Thanks!

  Posted by: carmen212 on September 21, 2007 at 11:55 PM

• Carmen212, you can watch it here

  Posted by: jonmountjoy on September 22, 2007 at 2:02 AM

• I will try and report something from Barcelona.

  Posted by: wgroth2 on September 22, 2007 at 11:40 AM