Azure Thoughts, EAI Challenges

Last day of condensed Microsoft SOA & BPM Conference 2009. This morning I followed a session around BAM and from then on I went to: Architectural session : SOA Governance with MS technologies: System Center, WCF and BTS ; Overview of BPM: Realizing the BPM Vision with SOA, Sharepoint and BizTalk ; EDI Session: Using SOA Principles to drive Modern EDI Solutions ; Closing Keynote by Robert Wahbe. Architectural session was not really about SOA Governance, but discussion around Broker Pattern, Dynamic Routing and EAI. As you can see in the slide .NET (WCF), BizTalk Server play a important role in pattern of Dynamic Routing. Next session by Burley Kawazaki was high level overview of BPM, how slow adoption to it is today and how approach could be to enhance adoption and apply by using Visio, SharePoint Designer, BizTalk Server 2009 and MOSS (Dashboard, Performance Point Server). Basically it was a sales pitch to show Microsoft has a complete stack of technology

Raul Camacho, SOA Solution Architect from Microsoft, did a talk about BAM to implement a service and SLA monitoring solution. Session is focused to IT pro to monitor BizTalk. Service Analytics use BAM, WCF and so on. What is Service Analytics. Why Services Analytics? For this is new (terminology) and concept. Slogan: one manages what one measures. This is to provide answers to the business around availability, performance, consumption and profitability. So it can help to identify dependencies. Approach of speaker (Microsoft) to real world scenario’s were, see slide below. To create observation model one can use Excel (Bam add-in after installation/configuration of BizTalk). With Bam API, event stream, one can send data into database (BAM Database). Once in database one can do whatever it wants (cubes, reporting and so on). Than Raul gave a demo at least he tried, but mouse did not work (so no demo yet). So he went to talk about challenges one can face. Mouse is wor

Next talk after this morning talk is the new Application LifeCycle Management experience for BizTalk Developer session by Stephen Kaufman. This session will dive into deep integration with Team Foundation Server and ALM. It started with a retrospective to what happing now with build, deploy, testing and debugging of orchestrations or mappings. This things are tedious and slowing down developers these days when using BizTalk 2006 R2 or lesser versions. New features of BizTalk Server 2009 are listed below in the slide (same as previous session ). What is ALM Experience? It is defined as in slide below.   And it benefits through increased business value (see my post about value proposition). It improves team results and brings indeed added value. This is demoed by co-speaker Vinay Ahuja in demo called BizTalkALM. Source Control for instance is completely integrated and functions better than source control in conjunction with previous versions of BizTalk (as soon in demo). Next

There is an need for an Application Server and Integration Server in SOA space. First basic what is word integrate mean: Content for talk today is why? (challenges: what will BizTalk solve), What? (Scenario’s capabilities), Who? and What’s new” (Now BizTalk 2009 and future); and Why is it important? Talk is focused to more with BizTalk! Landscape is changing, domain EAI is not new, where to unify systems and share data. Historic time line is displayed below: BizTalk plays a role in latter to. What does BizTalk solve? Summarized in IT Business Challenges. In the big picture it comes down to real world SOA. So it is people (consumers) and technology (supply data) to compositions (offer functionality). Common scenario’s for BizTalk are displayed below. BizTalk Server Workloads divided in six types (what can be done with BizTalk). Customer video Oncology Hematology Associates (Electronic Patient Dossier); Good video something for Dutch Health Care Secreta

Conference has started. It was kicked off by Eddie Amos. Even though there is a financial crisis going on and conference has been made condensed to 2 days :( there are: 400 attendees 25 countries 25 breakout sessions The it started of with Steve Martin debunking the myths around SOA. Is dead or alive? A lot of hype around it being alive or dead (see Anne Thomas Manes ). Here are some myths: Does SOA stops at Firewall? No it begins at the firewall. SOA Aligns the Business and IT... No, it is about the how to implement SOA. Alignment between IT and Business is done through people not technology (how). SOA Goverance fixes everthing... No it needs to expands all of IT not just SOA (true). Corny one SOA will teach children learn to read (haha). So judging from Steve Martin's talk SOA is alive; we are just at the beginning!!! Microsoft will be bring technology to get us there: WCF, WF, IIS/Dublin, Windows Azure Services Platform. Microso