My Sydney Workshop on "Dead Simple SOA"

Those who've been following my writings over the past few years would know that I deeply believe two things:

1. SOA is a fundamentally important way of organising systems that leads to improved business agility, sustainably lower operating costs and significantly lower operational risk.

2. The "SOA industry" has needlessly complicated SOA in a bid to sell technology and consulting services, and this has caused many business and IT professionals in customer organisations to become disillusioned with it.

I've been working on a white paper that will comprehensively address how to "do SOA" right, and this will be released in the next few weeks.

I've also decided to take the plunge and take my ideas to market, so to speak. Over the past few years, I have written about many topics (SOFEA/Presentation, LIMA/Identity Management and SOA, of course, including the REST flavour of its technology implementation), and these have received very positive feedback, but also lots of follow-up questions. So I thought (entirely without vanity) that perhaps practitioners could benefit by being able to engage with me in workshops, think and talk through these ideas so they can go away with a much clearer understanding of these concepts. A full working day of "face time" with an author can be quite useful, I figured. So I've set up a company (Eigner Pty Ltd) dedicated to IT Architecture Education, in partnership with an ex-colleague, Rahul Singh.

As our debut offering, Rahul and I have organised a one-day workshop on "Dead Simple SOA" in Sydney on Saturday the 8th of December, 2012. (We have regular jobs during the week, so weekends are the only times that work for us.)

Who should attend? Architects and senior designers. It's not aimed at web service developers.

Topics:

• Learning “Dependency-Oriented Thinking”
• The difference between SOA Governance and SOA Management, and how to do each
• What are “services”? Defining service boundaries using the Cohesion principle
• “Data on the Outside” vs “Data on the Inside” – Interface design using the Coupling principle
• The 3 core components of a SOA ecosystem based on a Web Services approach
• Implementing enterprise “-ilities” (security, reliability, asynchronous communications) with REST

We've booked a classroom at the UTS Haymarket campus, and have also organised catering for lunch (sandwiches) and tea (mid-morning and mid-afternoon), so this should be a fairly standard training experience from a logistical perspective. However, I'm hoping the content will be anything but conventional. I'm audaciously aiming to change the way people think about SOA and send them home with a powerful new set of conceptual tools that they can use immediately.

We're pricing this one-day workshop at a very reasonable $495 inclusive of GST. If someone registers before the 24th of November, that's $440. We don't want more than 10 people in a single session, because it's going to be interactive with hands-on exercises and I'll be going around the room and having one-on-one chats with the participants. I wouldn't be able to do every participant justice if we had more than 10 in a class.

So if anyone is interested, or if you know someone who would be interested, please contact us by mailing courses@eignertech.com.

The course brochure is here.