2nd International SOA Symposium October 22nd/23rd 2009

This week I attended the 2nd international SOA Symposium in Rotterdam, NL.

Great to meet all the great minds of the current SOA era. I was happy to personally meet Paul Brown, Tufic Boubez, David Chappell and Thomas Erl. Finally got a chance to get my SOA Books signed (thanks Thomas!).

Anyway, I wanted to share with you what I saw there.

1. A lot of vendors... Personally, I think SOA should be vendor agnostic and all these vendors were as always trying to push why their product is better than the competition's based on extra features which lock you in into their tooling :(

2. Remarkably low floor presence of all these good people for whom I had attended the event for. They were all in the SOA manifesto sessions. I was there but could not meet! If you wish to take a look btw, you can check out the SOA Manifesto here. I agree with their statements and one of my next posts will elaborate on why I think they are right. Unfortunately them being in these sessions did not allow me to speak with them more than a few words...

3. I think the quality/level of some speakers was well below expectations (yes it could still be me) but if a session is not interesting I will walk out to get more elsewhere. I walked out on a number of occasions. Hopefully others did not have similar experiences.

4. Great presentations by Paul Brown "The Critical Role of Architects in an Enterprise SOA", Thomas Erl/Anne Thomas Manes "Exorcising the Evil SOA: A Necessary Step Towards Next Generation SOA" (you should have seen the "Evil SOA!") and Steve Pope "SOA Governance and Management Practices".

5. Great architecture in the World Trade Center Rotterdam! I'm sure the photographers got some great shots.

Great espresso bar!