Sun on SOA

Must be selling season. Just took a meeting with local Sun folks talking about, among other things the SOA links with identity management. They've got a lot of attractive stuff on offer around managing heterogeneous environments. When you're a geek like me, you like the chatter about SOA, but I suppose their selling technique comes off as a bit technical, which isn't always the best approach.

Kudos for no power points on this one. That's really refreshing especially after sitting through some of the very highly polished presentations from IBM and BEA. If you can get your points across using a white board like that you obviously know your stuff.

I feel like the SOA implementation stuff shouldn't be a marquee selling point, but I'm sure if anyone can get away with that, it's Sun.

IBM on SOA

Yesterday I attended an IBM presentation by VP Doug Cox on Service-Oriented Architecture. The pitch was very much around what are the value-adds WebSphere can offer to leverage an SOA. I've been to some other vendors pitches recently including BEA's, but Doug's approach struck me as a very clever sales technique. There's a lot of effort that goes into explaining what is SOA, but that's not really where vendors should focus their efforts. Consider that the vendor-neutral aspects of SOA mean that vendors will gain their competitive advantage not from their SOA support, which is (will be) ubiquitous, but instead on their value-added use of SOA.

IT executives still need to understand SOA, so perhaps it's not so bad that they should seek their definition from elsewhere. I'm about halfway through professor Thomas Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design (ISBN 0-13-185858-0), which is a thick one that provides a good framework for explaining the architectural concepts and implementation strategy is sufficient detail.

Suhit Anantula, Blow Up Betty

I've been listening to Blowup Betty lately. Adelaide band with a few freebie downloads on their site: http://www.blowupbetty.com. I'll try emailing them again about podsafety, so as to play them on the show.

Another thing you may want to look at is Suhit Anantula's blog World is Green : Business Strategy and Sustainability. A nice survey of Green business in the media wild. He's agreed to come on the show for an interview. It's all down to me getting my act together. If you have a question for him do let me know or better yet send a link to an MP3 of you asking it. Include your name, how to pronouce etc...

Habits, I tell myself, it's all about habits. Go 22 days someone says and you've got it.

On-again, off-again blogging habit

I used to write for newspapers. I was a reporter and newspaper editor before I got jacked into the matrix.

I read somewhere that newspaper journalism is the opposite of writing. That rang true when I first sat down to blog. Still very much in the newspaper mindset, I found a wide-open field uncomfortable. Writing it off to overall pointlessness, I quickly abandoned the idea of blogging. The habit died before it could establish.

More recently, podcasting caught my imagination. David and I had what I consider a successful run at it. We recorded shows pretty-much weekly for 18 months. The pace of that was a bit much so we've given it a rest for a while, but we've been planning a return to the show albeit on a longer refresh cycle. That medium was so different from writing that the same issues never crept in.

Perhaps now that I'm nearly ten years removed from newspaper writing, I'll give it another try. If for no other reason to prove that my status as a recovering journalist is improving.

Investing in show prep here, I'll develop topics to cover on the podcast. Topics of interest include podsafe music, green politics, e-government, e-democracy, service oriented architecture, open source economics and what have you.

You can find the original podcast series on http://www.osterby.com.