In my last post, I noted that many people are having to reduce budgets. One of the keys to reducing budgets wisely is to target the cuts to the things that aren’t as strategic -check out the session If You Had an Application Strategy presented by Andy Kyte to get a better idea of what is (and isn’t) strategic. Another key to smart budget cutting is to understand your current set of applications, which Jim Duggan covers in a number of sessions on application porfolio management (APM) and Application: How to Achieve Success with APM, Best Practices in APM, APM: The First Step for IT Modenization.

I will highlight additional cost restructuring techniques and sessions in future posts…

This week, I attended our biggest annual conference – Symposium in Orlando. Understandably, a lot of the talk at the sessions and in the hallways was about the news in the financial markets, a tightening economy, and potential budget cuts. Gartner launched a useful little microsite tackling a lot this called IT and The Economy.
This got me thinking about how tough economic times will affect one of the central themes of the AADI Summit – SOA. My inclination is that many of you will be asked to put more meat behind your business cases and re-confirm that SOA efforts are worth pursuing in a time of tighter budgets. In some cases, the answer will actually be that SOA efforts should be put on hold, but in most cases that would be a big mistake. I would urge all of you to check out Anthony Bradley’s session entitled Finding the Value in SOA, which tackles this discussion head on with some phenominal advice backed up by a very powerful tool.

One of our attendees’ favorite way to network with their peers onsite is the Analyst User Roundtables. The idea is simple: one hour, one topic, one analyst moderating, and a dozen user attendees who share their experience, challenges and successes in a group discussion. We have 25 Roundtables this time, covering topics related (or complementary to) the analyst sessions on the agenda.

This year we are also adding another new twist – community roundtables – where users get to choose the topic and a user attendee co-leads the session. If you have a topic you would like to see covered in a roundtable (that you don’t see in the Analyst User Roundtable line up) or you would like to lead a roundtable, please send your suggestions to me.

Because of the limited size, these roundtables often “sell out” very quickly, so I highly recommend you register early (follow the link and sign into Agenda Builder to register for your selected AURs!).

Here’s the list…organized in a few broad categories.

Application Management & Governance

How to Achieve Success with Application Lifecycle Management – Jim Duggan
Best Practices in SOA Testing and Quality – Tom Murphy
Outsourcing Applications Development: What Works – What Doesn’t? – Joseph Feiman
Best Practices in Managing Customization of Packaged Applications – Andy Kyte
Managing the Application Team’s Staffing and Skillsets: What Works? What Doesn’t? – Susan Landry
Best Practices in Application Portfolio Management – Jim Duggan
Application and SOA Governance: Dos and Don’ts – Matt Hotle

SOA
Best Practices in Justifying SOA Investments – Paolo Malinverno
Best Practices in Service-Oriented Development – Michael Blechar
Organizing for SOA: Roles and Responsibilities – Paolo Malinverno
Leveraging BPM and SOA – Jim Sinur
Managing the Data Side of SOA: Dos and Don’ts – Marc Beyer
How to Implement a SOA Infrastructure: ESBs, Appliances, Flow Managers etc. – Massimo Pezzini
Best Practices in Using SOA Governance Technologies – Frank Kenney
Best Practices for B2B SOA – Benoit Lheureux
Advanced Practices: Making the Most of Event Processing and Event Driven Architecture – Roy Schulte

Modernization
Legacy Modernization Through SOA: What Works? What Doesn’t? – Dale Vecchio
Mainframe Migration: When and How to Do It? – Dale Vecchio
When and How to Adopt Open Source Software – Mark Driver

Web/Cloud
Best Practices in Implementing SOA With Web Oriented Architecture – Dan Sholler
Lessons Learned in Enterprise Mashups – Anthony Bradley
Next Practices: Getting Application Infrastructure Services From the Cloud – Yefim Natis
Next Practices: Developing and Running Applications In the Cloud – David Cearley
Lessons Learned in Integrating Software-as-a-Service in Your Application Portfolio – Ben Pring

You’ve heard it so many times by now – SOA success isn’t primarily about technology, it’s about process, organization, culture and people. So issues like how you pick the right people, how you make the most of your teams, how you promote excellence and change are crucial. We are pleased to announce a keynote that will help and guide our audience with some of these questions. Renowned author Malcolm Gladwell, of “Tipping Point” and “Blink” fame, is out with a brand new book this November (“Outliers”) and has agreed to present the closing keynote of the Summit, drawing from his new and earlier work to show how to step outside of formal organizational hierarchies and leverage social and psychological dynamics to create powerful movements for change and success.

Here’s the kicker: If you attend his keynote, you get his latest “Outliers” book for free, and you can even get it signed by the author!

We’ve posted all the session titles and descriptions of the December Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit, taking place Dec 8-10 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (co-located back to back with the Enterprise Architecture Summit).

For the 21st edition, we’ve revamped the agenda to provide even more relevant advice to our audience. There are two major themes this time: SOA and modernization. No big surprise there – SOA remains the elephant in the room for most architects and application teams today, and it is (or should be) part of a broader strategy to modernize legacy systems and bring on new generation application development practices that deliver value and competitive advantage.

What’s really new is that we’ve structured the SOA content according to the different levels of maturity. As SOA goes mainstream, there is a growing diversity in the level of experience and sophistication that our past attendees wanted us to address. So we created three dedicated tracks that essentially deliver SOA 101, 201 and 301.

The remaining two tracks cover modernization, either from the perspective of making the most of your legacy environments, or from the standpoint of building a 21st century application environment.

A few other new themes and “virtual tracks” include B2B & Multienterprise, Governance, and Web2.0/SaaS/Cloud.

More detail in later post as we highlight specific content, analysts, and give sneak previews of some of the presentations being developed. In the meantime, you can go to the event site and check out the PDF of the tracks and sessions or build your own agenda.