SHARE in Orlando

I attended SHARE in Orlando the last week of February 2008.  This was the third conference under my appointment as SHARE Director of Operations, and I was pleased with the outcome.  We met our attendance and budget targets, and the meeting facility at the Disney Coronado Springs was quite good.  The key business issues for SHARE this year are The SOA Journey and Virtualization.  Here are pointers to grids for the SOA Sessions and Virtualization Sessions that were presented in Orlando.  SHARE in Orlando was also one of the selected sites for IBM's announcement of the new System z model z10.  This was the only place that had a real running z10, and the computer was used by the attendees in hands-on labs the day of the announcement.  There were lots of IBM z10 presentations, but a key one is the IBM z10 Enterprise Class Overview, which gives the key new features of the z10.

The SOA program was particularly relevant to PSU.  It delved into a lot of the technologies, but even more interesting, it provided  different perspectives into what it means to implement SOA provided by three different well-know speakers.
The general session keynote speaker was Jeanette Horan, IBM VP of Business Process and Architectural Integration.  She presented IBM's Internal SOA Journey, which tells how IBM is deploying SOA to go from 155 Data Centers with 192 CIOs to 6 Data Centers with one CIO.  This is a well funded, very structured, top-down driven approach.
The SOA Project keynote speaker was Brenda Michelson, an independent consultant and Contributing Architect for Patricia Seybold Group, presented a different approach.  In her presentation The SOA Journey, Brenda compared implementing SOA to hiking the Appalachian Trail - not something you usually do all in one hiking trip.  She refers to developing SOA as Service Orienteering where the focus is on specific business benefits.
Another keynote presenter was Paul Giangarra, IBM Distinguished Engineer in the Office of the CTO, IBM Federal.  His presentation, SOA Start to Finish, focuses on the issues of information sharing within the enterprise with real-life examples from SOA projects in the Federal Government.

The Virtualization topic included a lot of IBM z/OS and z/VM zLinux presentation as expected, but also had a good variety of non-mainframe sessions.  For example, VMware presented Virtualization in the Next Generation Data Center, and IBM presented x86 Virtualization Technologies.  One of the most valuable to me was Desktop Virtualization, the Return of the Thin Client presented by Paul Seay, a Chief Architect for Northrop Grumman and a fellow SHARE board member.

SHARE is also delving into emerging technologies, especially through the Integrating Technologies Project.  One of the most interesting examples is a session called Web 2.0 Goes to Work presented by David Barnes from IBM.  The videos that he uses within his presentation are Available on YouTube, and he tagged all his web site references on Delicious.

Here is a general wrap-up article for SHARE in Orlando.  In two weeks I'll be heading for Chicago with our SHARE Program Managers to pull together the session content for SHARE in San Jose. 

  Al W.