I participated again in the annual IBM Softwareday. The headline this year was "Is your SW-strategy a Business strategy". Nice headline; buy IBM products and u will get a good business:- )

The most of the presentations was introduced with comments on open standards, the Document format-game and the judgement and fines from EU to MS; yes all with focus on Microsoft. One of the new initiatives was a annual price to the most innovative use of IBM products, which was given to Odense municipality for integrating 17 applications to one portal for the employees.

I followed the SOA-track titled Flexibility for the sake of business , which was the track with the least following in contradaction to the last year, where the SOA-track was the most popular. The most visited track this year was about portals, web 2.0 and the new Lotus Notes 8 titled "Get the full potential of your employees".

In the SOA-track there were presentations from three interesting cases from Coloplast, Torm and Actavis. The track was introduced by a demo of a BPM-based portal for a Establish Customer-proces, where the Customer lead has a view on all status, targets, Performance Indicators etc. At red lights must the lead take action by clicking further to online statistics, analysis and change the business rules. It looked real cool and benefit-full, but BPM SOA is the most mature state in SOA.

The initial scope for Coloplast has been on integrating their Oracle EnterpriseOne (ERP-system) and Siebel CRM in different locations global wise with use on IBM Websphere Proces Server (with ESB). The principle was to use lean (=clean) ERP and CRM-systems and implement the rest in a SOA-environment. The benefits are standardization and clean ERP and CRM-systems. More over have they now created the fundament for the future SOA-work, where they will work with BPM etc. There governance have almost only focus on the it-side, because the business-side is not matured yet.

Torm have really focus on one SOA-based Workplace for their employees in one portal, which is really benefitfull because of the very competitive environment, where the fleet rates for fuel change very fast. All their applications as Navision, Notes etc. (one interface) are integrated and presented in one Portal based on Websphere. One of the main benefits with Websphere is, that it is role based and procedure supporting, which allignes perfect with Saban Oxley, SOA-Governance… real good idea.

Actavis is a enterprise in the pharma-industry and they also mentioned the importance of process focused SOA, since 25’% of their products prices goes to validated processes.

The slides can be downloaded here.