EMEA Community Forum great success

I have just returned from the EMEA SOA Community event in Utrecht. It is probably the best Oracle forum event I've been to in over a decade of being being an Oracle Partner. Join the community now to ensure you don't miss out on next years event.

http://blogs.oracle.com/soacommunity/

BPM 11g PS3

A most interesting article on Oracle's recent release discussing the new features and how PS3 adds value to the whole SOA message.

http://redstack.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/what-bpm-adds-to-soa-suite/

SOA has been maturing over the last 3 years, early adopters might have made their early pioneering steps 5 or 6 years ago. But how mature are your SOA based systems and implementations and which projects are your next candidate ones?

This 15 minute survey may help lead the way...

Griffiths Waite's Speaking at OUG Irish Conference

Presentation Title:	Key Success factors for Fusion (Middleware) Projects
Speaker:	Mr Mark Simpson
Company:	Griffiths Waite
Co-presenter:
Presentation abstract:	Fusion Applications are built on the next generation technology stack with a core focus on catalogs of Services, Processes and Portals driven by user customisations. It is a different way of architecting applications from the tradition client server. Implementors will need to change the way teams and projects are structured to deliver solutions in this new architecture. SOA, BPM and User Interface skills will be key and projects will become iterative and agile. This session will share experiences from a team who have built many business focussed flexible solutions on top of this new technology and give a number of pointers to how your projects should be strcutured to build on top of and extend Fusion Technology and Applications.
Presentation begins:	30/03/2011 16:15
Presentation duration:	45
Presentation content level:	3 (1 = indepth, 5 = strategic overview)
Audience experience:	Experienced (2-3 years)
Audience function:	Customer / Senior Manager, Functional Manager, Partner
Speaker biography:	Mark leads the SOA consultancy practice at Griffiths Waite. As well as delivering many successful SOA implementations across multiple clients, he is a strong contributor to the community through his role as an Oracle ACE Director. In 2009 he was awarded with the EMEA SOA Partner Community Award for Outstanding Contribution. He has over 15 years experience with Oracle Technologies and currently specializes in SOA and BPM, with multiple articles published on these subjects. He is a frequent speaker at UKOUG, other Oracle Events (Open World, ODTUG etc.) and analyst conferences (Ovum, Gartner, IDC etc. ).
Related topics:	Fusion Middleware: General Fusion Middleware

More Details on Event

SOA Specialization for Griffiths Waite

Griffiths Waite Limited has today announced that it has achieved Oracle® PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized status for Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture [SOA]. The OPN Specialization programme offers Oracle’s most experienced and committed partners the opportunity to show differentiation and competitive edge in particular areas of the Oracle portfolio.

This represents a significant achievement for Griffiths Waite, because to achieve specialized status, Oracle partners are required to meet a stringent set of requirements based on the needs and priorities of the customer and partner community. By achieving specialized distinction, Griffiths Waite has been recognised by Oracle for its expertise in delivering services specifically around Oracle SOA Suite 11g through competency development, business results and proven success. Oracle SOA Suite 11g is an integrated, best-of-breed suite that helps customers rapidly design and assemble, deploy and manage, highly agile and adaptable business applications.

Read Full Press Release

Preparing for Fusion Applications

Griffiths Waitedeveloped a series of Oracle Fusion Middleware online seminars. Mark Simpson Oracle ACE Director gives an insight of the Oracle strategy, how Oracle is using Fusion Middleware to build Fusion Applications and how you can profit in your project from the Fusion Architecture.

Giving examples how customers can adopt use cases for Application Integration & Composite Application Portals & Application Modernization & Business Process Management. If you are interested make sure you watch the online seminarand take the SOA Maturity Assessment

Griffiths Waite are SOA Specialized and active members of the SOA Partner community. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required)

View Webinar

SOA Books for OOW2010

Open World is upon us once again and no, the is not a review of the latest Iain Banks novel to accompany you through your travels to San Francisco. Instead it is a guide to some of the books that I am looking forward to picking up at Open World - or in some cases have already received and are in prominent places on the bookshelf.

Each year Open World is greeted by the release of a number of key technology books, often seen as a target for authors and publishers of Oracle texts. It is a great chance to browse through the latest releases and meet up with authors at various panel and launch events. With SOA, this year is no exception. There are a variety of books on the subject being released either just before OOW or at the conference. I have picked out a selection here that any current or aspiring Oracle SOA Deveoper or Architect should look out for.

Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1 Developer's Guide

Antony Reynolds, Matt Wright

I was delighted when this book was updated for SOA Suite 11g, our team at Griffiths Waite used the original book extensively as it adds real examples to the theory that you get through training and tutorials. It also gives valueable advice on how to structure services and which tools to use for which purpose. It is hard enough authoring such a book when you are based in the same office, so since the relocation of Antony and Matt to the US and Australia respectively it is a great credit to get the update released.

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Lucas Jellema

I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of this book, it promises to be a key "go to" source in our reference library. I have seen a lot of contributions from other ACE Directors, experts in particular tools and most importantly much time spent by Lucas in getting each and every scenario from the book working in his case study environment. As well as writing the book, Lucas has also delivered an enterprise scope project for the fictional hospital that forms the underlying case study. This book promises to be practical, complete and more than the sum of all the parts.

Service-Oriented Architecture : An Integration Blueprint

Guido Schmutz, Daniel Liebhart, Peter Welkenbach

A comprehensive walk through the differing types of architectures that you will experience, from data integration to service orchestration and event architecture. The book first introduces the various principles and models in integration. If you are looking for terminology, protocols and patterns to be explained, this book does a good job. An integration blueprint / reference architecture is presented, splitting the architecture into layers. This model maps closely to others I have used, but I would say it is a little more vendor agnostic than most that go to this level of detail, which is useful for those who have not selected middleware tools yet. One very useful section is presented at the end showing how products (covering Oracle FMW, IBM Websphere, MS Biztalk/.Net and Spring/Open Source) map onto this arhcitectural blueprint. This was very interesting for me with, as to date most of my implementations have been purely Oracle based.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns

Harish Gaur, Markus Zirn and Contributors

Harish and Markus have done a fine job over the last couple of years in bring together a series of articles that showcase the use of muliple Fusion Middleware tools together. It includes some very innovative use cases. Often I get asked about perceived overlaps between Oracle products and get asked to recommend which tools to use for which pupose and which scenarios to combine the tools - this book will be a good starting point to show examples wo back up these discussions. One of the chapters is an article I contributed last year with a colleague and shows the potential of combining SOA with BAM and BI. The project in question is not at this level of innovation yet, but has a solid SOA and BAM base to build on top of and start to realise some of the innovative benefits shown in the article.

Lots of reading over the next couple of weeks then, it will be a busy time.