The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself - we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]

I was on a panel at nGenera’s (nee New Paradigm) Enterprise 2.0 get-together in Dallas last week. I missed the first day because I was speaking somewhere else and unfortunately missed listening to and meeting Ray Kurzweil, but the second day has some pretty good presentations by the nGenera staff, including Don Tapscott and my [...]

My second set of thoughts were prompted by notes on a presentation by the CMO of Walmart.com, Cathy Halligan. She began by noting that they no longer see a digital divide  - there is a big percentage overlap between their online and offline shoppers.In addition, online activities are increasingly influencing offline purchase patterns and [...]

In keeping with the open source theme this week (given I am at Intalio’s user conference), a quick note about Jaspersoft who just released version 3. This version puts a nice web 2.0 interface on a browser-based product. There’s a nice dashboard with some mashup capabilities and input controls that can be dragged and dropped [...]

Greg Olsen from Coghead presented how they are using Intalio’s BPMS. Greg is a believer in “small BPM” - something to extend and enhance something else. Greg’s experience led him to conclude that some basic database/process capabilities could be very useful to non-developers. Coghead was a platform as a service play from the beginning and [...]

Jeff Hammond’s theme for this presentation is that as enterprise experiment with web 2.0 some successful adoption patterns are emerging. There are three ways to look at web 2.0:

Enabling technologies
Flex, Air, Silverlight, XML, Ajax, cloud computing
Core applications
Blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, rss, mashups built on these core technologies
Behavior shifts
Information workplaces, social computing, dynamic business applications, [...]

Mark Hennessy the CIO from IBM presented on his perspective on the changing role of the CIO. An IBM survey in 2005 found that of CEOs 80% thought IT had to be aligned to be successful but only 45% thought this was something they did well. More recent surveys showed CIOs feeling that this was [...]

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

Rich Lechner of IBM came next, talking about the new enterprise and it’s new enterprise data center. Supporting business innovation is impacted, he said, by three things:

Globalization
The change from an exporter to a multi-country set of counties to a truly globally integrated enterprise - tapping into new talent pools around the world.
Rising tide of information
More [...]

Irene and Dean of TopQuadrant (a semantic web company) were up next talking about Deploying Semantic Web Solutions: I’ve Built an Ontology, Now What?
The challenges around Master Data Management have expanded as the number of information sources has exploded. Managing identify, managing semantics across a multi-faceted, distributed world is very complex. The semantic web standards [...]