For many years, IT developers and system users have been searching for effective and efficient means of integrating their systems. Very often this results in a tangle of specially crafted interfaces and connectors. There are issues with data format definition, operations timing and synchronisation and more subtle problems with mismatches in semantic meaning. All this has made the provision of IT application support for rapidly evolving business processes both difficult and expensive.

A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a clean and elegant solution to these issues. Based on standards such as XML, SOAP and Web Services stack, an SOA provides a means of achieving the necessary agility and flexibility to support rapidly evolving business processes and changing business objectives and goals.

The design and development of an SOA requires the application of a number of techniques - stemming from disciplines such as Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Modelling, Component-based development and Object-oriented methods - to produce modular, reusable and replacement software applications. Further, most of the building blocks in the SOA will be in existence in the form of legacy applications. However these will usually need re-engineering to provide access to their functionality and data from a wider population of consumers. This workshop is aimed at clarifying the mystique surrounding SOA, describing scenarios in which an SOA is of considerable value and detailing the steps needed to design and implement an SOA starting from the baseline of an existing portfolio of applications.

There will be plenty of time to respond to questions and hopefully provide more than generalising guidance.

The workshop will be focused on the business aspects of SOA rather than on technical issues. We will not describe individual products in any depth and theoretical and technical descriptions will be minimised. The thrust will be on gaining the business benefits from service orientation, working from the current application portfolio and the existing IT baseline.

Topics covered include:

• What are services and why are they important - using the web for application integration
• The structure of service-oriented applications - the technical fundamentals
• What services do I need - a method based on business process analysis
• Using enterprise architecture, component-based development and object oriented techniques
• Liberating Legacy - how to service enable existing applications
• How to build and implement service orientation applications - the infrastructure and non-functional requirements
• Governance of a service oriented environment - setting policy, managing the business, measuring success
• Ten key success factors

Who should attend?
CIOs, Senior IT Architects, senior system developers, business systems analysts and application users with a keen interest in how applications can be built to meet changing business requirements.

If you would prefer not to book online, please call 0161 242 2121.