Closing Keynote

Zobra has 100K users with very competitive rates

200 billion processors with 20 billion devices on the Internet

Virtualization and agility is the key themes of infrastructure - business needs agility and how can you measure it

Employee owned PCs will be a big part

Desk phones will end as wireless to the IPX

20 % of communication re-allocating into new technologies

Daryl Plummer - software - Pain points of the business - SOA helps you get into the business

Versatilists - people who can do a lot do stuff - versatility seen as the new way; business innovation must happen by attracting different people

Diversity - only the area that is declining is engineering - IT selection field is shrinking out of school

Commit to make tough decisions

What is your personal action plan

Tap into the generation Y mind set

What is wrong with the policies

XML Middleware: Frank Kenney

I tried to go to this session but it was a room way too small for the session.

I did read the slides and there are couple of good points.

Need to review this broadly especially slide 8. It is a nice architecture slide.

Last Day: day 5

Last night went to dinner to Jiko's with the guys from World Savings Bank. Great meal and a great opportunity to meet friends

I was planning to go to bed around 11:30 when my new neighbors at the hotel came in drunk. About 12:15 I confronted them and then things got ugly. I finally got to sleep around 1am.

Needless to say I am changing rooms today. Ugh So I missed the 8 am session taking care of that.

SharePoint and Google: Whit Andrews

Simple will not save you;

Trade-offs between content management and information access


Here is the presentation

Simple saves projects - In a space that I think about some but not really

This presentation is a must read

They contend that Office 2007 and Vista are the last major releases of the these products from Microsoft.

The next gen versions based upon the Live strategy.

This presentation is a must read

They contend that Office 2007 and Vista are the last major releases of the these products from Microsoft.

The next gen versions based upon the Live strategy.

Infrastructure Governance: Frank Kennedy

Here is the presentation on the CD. Need to get the new presentation

SOA common from so many places

Significant number of services will come from the business application guys: SAP, Oracle and Microsoft

They have fully service oriented the latest stuff - how do you govern these

Innovations in architecture
Role of an Integration Competency
Which vendors - fast moving market - latest vendor space

Recommends using the framework on page 3 for governance view

Registry is the lynchpins for knowing and understanding your assets - Registry create references to your stuff

Who is using the service, etc.

SOA Policy Management - Policy Creation - need a way to create this and then enforcement from there

RACI Table for SOA Governance - need to look at this; map out internal teama and see where are the gaps

Everybody has some of the technology suite

Mindreef provide testing and validation space for the first time - QA becomes - vendord who do it all

IBM and Mercury in this space

Who was missing: WebLayers - show us the web layers slide

Systinet and Mercury was Switzerland - not sure if the value is still there in HP !!!

Big time statement

Microsoft will have the SOA Framework is in the OS

IBM has done a good job rationalizing their product

Conclusion: Need to follow up on the HP statement; not sure what he means but it was a warning shot. Lack of web layers mention was important.

IT has Value: Audrey Apfel

Consider renegade research: disruptive to main flow.
Good presentation here


Forecasting IT investment value with traditional methods has not yielded convincing results: Advocating not doing this

Why won't current methods for forecasting value of IT investments ever work well

The result is mixed: the hardest is big infrastructure or architecture where they must trust the CIO

Big cumbersome process that does not seem to rely help anyone make the a decision

Business case development takes too long to make innovation to move forward.

Harvesting value is too random and too distant from the revenue generation size

Time to value is too way out

Executive decisions are not always data-driven; strong believe in the project. Go with gut

Credibility trumps data or analysis; decisions based on soft criteria is rational and appropriate for senior executives

Slide on CEO vs. CIO thinking

Decisions at the CEO made at much more quick pace; action oriented
Differences between CEOs and CIOs:
􀂄 The speed at which they arrive at decisions when under pressure
􀂄 Action-oriented style of CEO decision-making
􀂄 CEOs eschew some of the more analytical qualities that are
associated with successful technology executives
􀂄 Manner in which they communicate decisions to the people around
them

- Source: Korn/Ferry International Research Study 2005 "CIO To CEO"

"It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult
words but rather short, easy words like 'What about lunch?'"
-- Winnie the Pooh


Pooh's Little Instruction Book

Value forecasting

Take a leap of faith; business executives will follow you.

Big point: Trust and credibility will get you more than numbers and data

Measuring perception as a strategy - perception of success

How they perceive value is only a twice year process - does not change that often and becomes a tool to look at this

Reporting back on the financial modelling on the back end build credibility -

Conclusion: Very interesting piece of work; this makes sense and we should at least look into this

Key note Intel

Moore's law is still holding true

To keep the model going, price points need to keep coming down. Not to free, but lower.

Shows a really cool hand held

Shows off the class room laptops -

Nice presentation - not much new

Multi Channel Round Table

Allan Shubb and I attended the a round table on Multi-Channel. The folks from HBSC were very much in tune here, with their channel ficus and challenge on the multi-channel nature of HBSC.

HBSC sees IT leading the business to multi-channel as well.

Capital One becoming a bank which is very ironic given their legacy

The analyst from Gartner did not have a lot to say. It was quite a disappointment that she did not drive but Allan warned me. She was a dud.

Conclusion: We are at the head of multi-channel.

Managing Legacy Portfolio: Richard Hunter

I had to leave out this one early. Good presentation and a call to active portfolio management. I liked this presentation.

I like the perspective on planning migration when the risk rises steeply as compared to value - How can we build these simple views, while backing these up with real numbers, as part of portfolio management. Nice view page 1 in the deck

Day 4

Last night we went dinner. 5 folks from Wachovia and two guys from World Savings Bank. It was great time and a good chance to break bread with the guys from the new part of Wachovia.

I went off the grid yesterday for a while and I am now paying the price...

Oher Day 3 content

Stuff that I did not see but wanted to.

Ten Key technologies for 2007

Windows vs Linux vs Everything Else

Cisco Keynote: John Chambers

What now that Cisco that the plumbing is done?

Intelligence in the network

Branding campaign across all of IT; a systems view of networking -

Heritage is out of the Internet

Definition of router and device is changing; Cisco will pay at hardware, software and ASX - at all layers 1 through 7 -

Virtualization - Once they go into market, become a market leader - enter only when they have a differentiation strategy and can get 40% market share

Need big broadband to do video -

Entering into the video market again - Tele presence in the future dramatically reduce travel - much more here than

Video fills network

Putting the head of costumer advocacy in India - building out the Architecture from there

Frank Kenney one on one

I had my analyst one on one with Frank Kenney again

Action Item: There will be a First Look on the IBM Registry and Repository this week.

Action Item: Frank is publishing in the space of the Technical mechanisms on SOA governance and vendors this quarter

Makes a difference between SOA vs. Service governance

AmberPoint may be the next major acquisition; made a case why IBM acquiring WebLayers is not a long term look

He suggested we look at AmberPoint despite this as they can do they

Mentions that the Webify approach

Working for the Man: enterprise architecture as a strategic discipline: Frank Schlier

Enterprise Architecture beyond IT

Enterprise Architecture will be about architecting the enterprise; the traditional focus has been technical architecture - very mature

Business architecture is still in its infancy

Business architecture is about competitive differentiation

Enterprise Vision is inspirational in nature

Architecting never stops; until the enterprise becomes static (which is never); then you stop architecting.

Defining measurements is part of IT.

We are architect with now not for you

The architecture and what is the enterprise varies by organization

Enterprise is a system put together to fulfill their own needs; needs of the person establishing those needs and exchanging the generated stuff in marketplace. Reality the enterprise needs to go into market place to get stuff to accomplish the set out needs

A need fulfillment system.

Transition from industrial age to the information age - in the automation transition -

Industrial age - leveraging muscle with technology

Information Age - leverage all resources with information

Pre 1995 - IT was used to cut costs

Internet age lets try to grow revenue, while trying to contain costs

Today, do both

Conclusion: Interesting perspective of Enterprise Architecture

Consumerization Of IT

I did not attend this session but it looks very interesting

Increasing, the pressure on enterprise IT to adopt the external stuff that their employees and consumers can do at home internally. This trend will only accelerate

Look interesting, here is the presentation

Enterprise Architecture and BPM: Robert Handler

Here is the presentation

He has written a book in this space

Page 6 provided a nice high level view of architecture that I really liked

His main view is the Enterprise Architecture collide and merge in the future; expands role of Enterprise Architecture

Conclusion: Not much tangible here. A waste of time too early in the morning

Enterprise Architecture is making the DNA of the enterprise

Day 3

Last night was the party at MGM. I spent time with a guy with World Savings Bank. Reaaly good guy and new his stuff. Heads up IT research and looks at alot new, interesting technology.

Late night making this AM a tough one; spending the morning looking at enterprise architecture and meeting up with Frank Kenney.

Data Power

Sat through the Data Power Presentation from IBM. The former head CTO of Data Power spoke. Noting new to us really.

Goog-azon: Hung HeLong

Here is the deck

Web 2.0 monsters Imagine a Google, Amazon composition that dominates the retails space or Walmart and Yahoo

Search engine uses web services servant portal

Two major servant portals - Google

XML tags that enable these portals to use blogs and content providers in public environment

How will you look at this threat

Provide services in the marketplace that Goog-Azon can get to; how will compete and provide these services

We clearly will not compete these portals - what do we do - how do we extend into the market place.

SOA as a our contributor to this and the ability to offer our services into the marketplace, falling into the opportunistic quadrant presented.

Conclusion: The presenter is looking out ten years and predicting that there will be a major dominant online retailer. How will we be positioning in light of this.

CIO Agenda 2006.5: Mark McDonald

I went to a replay of this presentation as I went another one at the same time.

Customer defines the strategy

2006 CIO response survey results shows that IT won; the business expectations and requirements including Innovation shows that dependence upon IT to deliver value to the end customer

Business is looking to generate ideas and make them more competitive

CIO Attention today is in the business; need to move the things for tomorrow into today. The things of today are expectations (table stakes per Joe Monk).

2007
1. Need to retool and recraft IT
2. Creating new enterprise
3. Moving to Information and Technology

Business expectations on IT are actually expectations for the business. IT at the vangaurd for creating competitive advantage.

Capabilities from one marketplace like Capital One and targeting into new markets (commercial loans) where service and speed do matter.

Contradictions - how do I do something that is considered not possible and make it possible

Fed ex 6 by 6 initiatives - 2007 to deliver business roles and accomplishments

What does this mean - In the business and working On the business from black to blue, changing the shape from a rectangle to a circle

New stuff (on the business) who thinks about in and on is CEO and the CIO - the business leaders are always in the business. Need more collaborative based approach. The business will not have requirements. On the business means

2007 Checklist

On the business
· What are the customers saying - find out what they care about
· If you only deliver an uptime score card, then you have issue showing IT value - talk to the business in business value

Conclusion: I do not have soft copy of this presentation but it was very good.

Ballmer Keynote

Transition from software from pre-Internet to Live click to run

Still a need for software development that is long term; not an end to big long projects; need various muscle types (fast twitch to slow twitch), long cycle innovation is still around but shorter innovation cycles needed

Click to run simplicity is coming

Too much integration with innovation in Vista - need to innovate and integrate, not at the same time -

He sees Vista as a 2 to 3 year Windows release cycle behind XP SP2 - interesting perspective

Hardened the interfaces, reduce the attack points as a security perspective,

Give the ability to use policy based stuff as well

People center means the end customer - Unless the business sees the value then there is no need

The IS folks are people too;

Live platform is the Microsoft consumerization solution

Search is still a evolving space - need more, especially internally. The Office 2007 product increase this search

The unstructured pieces of the process is where Microsoft with Office 2007, embracing the workflow process.

Customization in Sharepoint to fairly structure CRM model.

Need a path forward from older models of CRM from Microsoft; Oracle is trying to get rid all of the cakes but one; SAP says ignore the cake - around CRM

Gates retirement: no real change

Four principles of Microsoft (got to see this)

1. Invest in multiple in separate cores; desktop, entertainment, enterprise, etc. Broad portfolio
2. Software is innovation business. Stop innovating and die
3. Live platform is very important
4. Tenacity and long term approach; will continue to keep working and working.

Position well in the entertainment business; media center and Zune as examples

Online time replacing reading time

Competing to free: how to compete not a usual marketplace - total benefit - total cost equals total benefit. We be competing for the future - the value proposition from Microsoft must only grow (i.e. Office 2007 integration is far beyond OpenOffice)

Open vs. closed ecosystem - open ecosystems are typically chaotic; closed is ok but creates a barrier - looking at managed ecosystem where Microsoft provides management to ensure compliance

5 year view of Microsoft

1. Leading edge of defining IT; key is talent - looking to retain and get talent and then enable them
2. Live as platform is transforming event - software as a service

IBM Eval: David Cearley

Has the focus at Gartner on IBM. This is
the presentation

IBM revenue stream is less and less from hardware, and the focus is software and services.

Software has high margins

IBM acquisitions and divestures show the movement away from machines and towards software and services (example lose the printers and PCS, but buy Rational and Ascential)

On Demand from IBM - hard to understand

Message is complex and hard to make actionable for customers

SOA was part of IBM's On Demand view

Focusing today on Innovation that matters

Strong view on SOA; flash the SOA framework that we have seen and had made major software announcements in the space. SOA Governance is a strong play as well. Data Power is an enabling technology Mentions the Repository and Registry as a leader - found this very strange and need to get confirmation on this from Gartner.

SOA is not everything but touches everything.

Information on Demand - good strategy; new announcements on the way - watch this space.

WSRR - need to evaluate this; cautious if not a pure IBM shop - this space should be competitive space

SOA Fabric - packaging model for the service registry.

IBM as an application provider - the application concept is different. Not a packaged app but a vertical stack it can deliver into a marketplace as a packaging around the SOA fabric.

Much more to make this Fabric real

Did not see any focus on the hardware side at all.

Overall, positive on IBM. Good strategy, good financials. On Demand is a concern as it is being ignored. Considers the are the strongest they have been in 20 years. Still not a one stop shop.

Conclusion: Interesting but we knew this stuff and/or seen recently. I think Gartner gives them too much credit here on the SOA front.

Innovation: Kathy Harris

Very well attended session. This is the presentation

Innovation is the step wise, leaps - the every day efficiency, incremental changes is an expectation on everybody and not innovation

Lead customer as innovator - they will lead to leading edge trends

The deck discusses six types of innovators - would be interesting to look at this space and try and label Wachovia Retail into one of these categories with the planning team - I think we a conservative follower.

Quadrant view of innovation: the lower two quadrants see innovation as a must do to move out of a crisis situation

Innovation out of success is a challenge

Innovate needs Focus - you must focus to do this well and measure what our threats and/or opportunities -

Bank of America is getting a lot love at this conference; I have not heard our name once !!! She mentions them so many times.

The selection of ideas into build and operate is where most innovation dies; bridging the gap is a real challenge. There are our practices here; one of the most common is to get the operational folks signed up early on. If they do not sign up. Move on to the next idea. Good strategy.

Innovation technology - most of us have the technology - managing the ideas is one technology - low cost tools

Critical technology is the process of make innovation a repeatable, sustainable process vs. a one off

Need creative people - most people are - need freedom in the corporate culture to be creative

Will have lots of challengers need them to move into collaboration - switching challengers into collaboration is accomplishable - the next stage is cooperation, a sense of management and control

Need to be proficient in managing ideas; get to no faster and enforce this

The spider diagram can be used to score the ideas; looking for a best fit. Should tailor the spider diagram to your situation - need ability to accelerate great ideas - need innovator mentors at the senior level to help this out.

Need strong project management to do innovation - need sharp focus

Innovation - walk the walk and believe in innovation at the CEO level - have to start there to make this work -

Conclusion: Important topic and good presentation.

Day two

Last night six of from Wachovia went to dinner at Wolfgang Pucks in Downtown Disney

The weather yesterday was incredible; upper 70s and little humidity

The conference attendance seems flat our a little down from last year

My kids are so jealous that I am here; we have managed to keep the secret that they will be coming down Friday from them safe for now. I am so looking forward to spending a few days at WDW with them.

We had a power surge, outage this morning at 8am. Too many geeks powering up. Need more power

Application Server - Yafeem

Stages of SOA Adoption require growing technology commitment

Messaging based solutions are the proven for high performance; does not exist on J2EE or .Net; new platforms based on event-driven architecture

Use to just buy an application server which today only support heterogeneous business component networks -

With SOA these app server construct are pulled out into SOA Infrastructure

The SOA Backplane is the Gartner concept for SOA Infrastructure

In order to deal with the heterogeneity and the complexity, the SOA vendors turn to SOA

Extensible suites is there answer

Vendors

BEA - attack on three fronts

WebLogic, Tuxedo, and AquaLogic

IBM - largest of breadth of offerings, slow to deliver of vision, expensive and complex offering. Not the best of the breed

Microsoft - struggling to find the identity in the enterprise space - selling solutions to enterprise projects is more than just delivering software in the box; long term relationship view - does not have the support organization in place - does not understand that the enterprise wants an accountable partner - moving to Software as a service
Late to SOA but can scale -

Oracle most invested in Event driven architecture - have a product in this space. Late to market

SAP - Largest Niche player in the world - very, very late to market - entry only through install base

Red hat wants to be a open source vendor for SOA - forms competition with IVM and other strategic partners -

Best of breed is clearly the best but the integration issues are you own - users will end up doing the best of breed between suites


No mention of the HP acquisition and its meaning for the SOA Backplane.


Conclusion: very good presentation and worth a read. Here is the deck

Roy Schulte - application integration

Traditionally one of my favorite Gartner analysts but not the best speaker


Every large company is a virtual enterprise composed of multiple domains

Does not stand alone; with suppliers and outsourcers part of this virtual enterprise

Integration Links across the business units are growing (i.e CIB and Retail Lending)

Justification of expanding investments in application integration

Application integration inspired by business requirement; today continues to grow with Regulatory compliance and B2B

Mergers and acquisitions - single view of the customer

No application is an island; no system runs by itself today

Batch file transfer was good enough for past business integration requirements

Today, business requires real time reconciliation of data and ability to change the process wiring on the fly

Soft wired vs hard wired integration

Cooperating systems provide real time data reconciliation and flow if control; unfortunately you typely couple these systems. You want to loose couple these from an app integration and provide a degree of isolation - competing demands on integration

Graphic posted here sophistication on t axis, x axis is scope of integration -

Four styles of application integration

Vertical axis - communication patter - fully asynchronous , interactive

Horizontal axis - data integration vs. logic integration

Fully asynch, data integration - batch transfer
Asynch, logic integration - multo-process integration - classic BPM - middleware approaches
Interaction, data - composite application data - federated database tool as example
Interaction, logic - SOA

SOA is must valuable in the interaction, logic examples -

Building a SOA application is very different than building a monolithic system; each service is a black box - a monolithic application is the black box

Planning assumption: in 2011, we will have more data redundancy than 2006 based upon business needs, despite the desire to reverse this

Service Oriented Architecture - 1996 can out from Gartner -

A large enterprise will have disparate versions of certain SOA service in multiple business units and application

Trust boundary is typically within a business unit tea; the not invented here syndrome is not solved by SOA. Governance is still in vogue.

Pitching the ESB as the communication backbone for SOA applications

ESB technology vs products is confusing - no convergence on the terms and the product space -

Shows a three layer SOA deployment topology


Expect to have multiple ESBS to operate - a federated integration COE to organize these ESBs - interoperating this together will be a challenge

Half of the companies will unmanaged backbones and no approach across this -

Open sourced ESBs - at least four ESBs - Mule is the largest and oldest - some in production - Sun has one, along with ObjectWeb - Most of them do not have production references - If you are ahead off the curve, could be time

CONCLUSION: Nothing that we do not know - the point on managing ESBs across domains and have manner to ensure that we cross domains is important - His slide deck is worth reading

Rober LeBlanc IBM BPM

Key Themes

· Services are the building blocks for the services
· Business Process Management as a Lifecycle - Model and simulate the process
· Collaborative development in modeling tools - PowerPoint and Visio are not modeling tools
· Monitoring of the processes
· Process centric projects need aligned goals and senior management sponsorship
○ Both sides needs to see value in the automated process
○ Process must be modeled to understand the impact
· BPM methodology concerns provided to the market by IBM
· Business need skills around business process modeling - major Sis have this
· Use the business analyst tool
· Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result - Einstein or Ben Franklin
· IBM business catalog - Banking 300* business process and 1600 activities
· SOA reduces maintenance and deployment costs b 30%
· Process change requires management of assets - how do I control my assets - need to encourage reuse and enforce governance
· Business Monitor adding business activity monitoring and a dashboard framework for tailoring views together
· Linking the modeler and monitor together for the basis of analysis

Harley Davidson - Customer Testimonal

· Using IBM Portal for front end integration
· Back end integration via WPS
· Using SAP as well
· Harley's Game Plan
○ Align with business strategies
○ Create the vision of IT end state way out there
○ Develop the roadmap to get next few steps
○ Design the enterprise architecture
○ Run the operation like a business; measure it;
○ Protect the Brand and Instill Trust - Security
○ Invest in your people - change management

Karen Yousuff IBM SOA Strategy and Practice

Process Modeler demo

Software as a service: Scott Nelson

Sat through this and came away with not much; I was creating this blog at the time and the hall was not very good.

Still worth a read


Here is the presentation

Financial Services 2012: Susan Landry

Consumerization and Globalization macro trends that will affect the Financial Services

Two significant issues:

Trust - must maintain this and guard the trust

Risk - more than just credit risk; risk across the board

Standards are important (mentioned IFW, misspelled ACORD)

Impression: not very good. She misses some important points along the way.

Background

I am a Senior IT architect for Wachovia Corpoaration. This is my second Gartner in a row. I am looking to see a variety of stuff across several fields and disciplines

Rough Start to Gartner 2006

The plane that I and two colleagues was on was delayed leaving Charlotte by 3 hours; in fact the direct flight that was scheduled to leave almost two hours behind us left on time and made it on time to Orlando. As a result, we missed our dinner reservations and I did not eat dinner until 10:45. I finally got into my room at 11:25 and did not get into bed until after midnight last night.

The wake up call from Mickey and Stitch came in at 7:05 this morning. I made the fatal mistake of turning back over and did not wake up until 8am. I decided right then to miss the first session and took care of bunch of business, including my analyst session setup. Oh well, nobody got hurt and I am actively online.

Man, do I hate Usairways right now....

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