SYS-CON Publishing Director Jeremy Geelan moderated an SOA "Power Panel" recorded at the Reuters TV studio in New York City and involving executives from Altova, MindReef, CA, and IONA Technologies. In a lively 50 minutes, panel members discussed how modern organizations must think about SOA strategies, the issues involved in designing and deploying SOAs, and how the very idea of a SOA strategy affects all parts of the organization.

Eric Newcomer of IONA started the conversation off by saying that SOAs represent "a new way of thinking about IT. You have to think about your systems overall in the organization." He added that companies must "get (everyone, including) CEOs thinking about (SOAs) in the organization."

CA's Paul Lipton agreed, saying that SOAs require "a huge change in the thinking of organizations, (and) we still have a long way to go. Development projects are incented toward reducing costs and time-to-delivery…but in thinking about SOA, sometimes it’s good to think about the overall good of the organization...incentives in the organizations need to change."

MindReef's Aaron White spoke about what Geelan referred to as the  "more down and dirty" aspects of SOA development, noting that even though companies deploying an SOA strategy must experience "a re-framing of how (they've) done things previously," that in any case "you have to start one, build one, deploy one, get your feet wet a bit so that you can see what (SOA) can do for you."

David Kershaw of Altova pointed out that his company "is not specifically in the SOA market space, (as) our tools touch on a broad variety of activities." But he agreed with the other panelists that "you want to have your developers thinking differently, but you can't assume that every developer will have the same understanding of the big picture. So the organization has to provide quite a bit of support for people."

The four panelists didn't agree about everything, as they dove into more technical subjects as well as the overall architectural and organizational approach toward SOA. The complete SOA Power Panel broadcast is available on SYS-CON.TV.



10th International "SOA Web Services Edge 2006 Conference & Expo" panel discussion taped live at SYS-CON.TV's Times Square studios will stream on Monday, December 5, 2005, and "Enterprise Open Source Power Panel" will stream on Wednesday, December 7, 2005.