The IMPACT on Architects and Developers
Saturday, May 9, 2009
What an IMPACTful week. IBM certainly pulled out all the stops at their annual IMPACT SOA conference held this week in Las Vegas. In case you missed it, IBM highlighted a slew of new products.
What I find most interesting of the lot is the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance for managing private clouds and the new products around rules, optimization and virtualization from last year's ILOG acquisition. Frankly, it's a challenge to keep track of the hundreds of products in the IBM middleware portfolio but what the IMPACT announcements really get at is the need for architects and developers to address the challenges associated with sustaining the infrastructure.
Speaking very clearly about the value of SOA, Joe McKendrick aptly reported on IBM's Steve Mills who laid down the gauntlet and challenged the audience to find him a company not interested in SOA principles.
Of course, when you attend a conference like IMPACT, you tend to expect announcements about new products, bold statements from the executives and shots from the competition (like the recent WebSphere challenge issued by Microsoft).
What I didn't expect to find among the sea of people were the lines of architects and developers waiting to take various certification tests. The lines were so deep you'd almost think Billy Crystal was administering the tests.
IBM offered certifications in WebSphere, SOA and XML and the folks over at ZapThink offered a SOA for Managers Certification Course. When you think about it, the interest makes sense. After all, these events really should be about the folks who actually use the technology to do their jobs.
Now you could argue that the lines are sign of the times as IT professionals beef up their resumes with additional certifications.
Though as I've mentioned before in this blog, regardless of the marketing term du jour (SOA, cloud, virtualization, etc.) IT professionals who have a mastery of the way that the architecture can reduce costs as well as the skills to execute on the strategy will always be in demand, regardless of the way the economy turns.
As for IMPACT 2010, there's already some buzz about it...
-Jeff
What I find most interesting of the lot is the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance for managing private clouds and the new products around rules, optimization and virtualization from last year's ILOG acquisition. Frankly, it's a challenge to keep track of the hundreds of products in the IBM middleware portfolio but what the IMPACT announcements really get at is the need for architects and developers to address the challenges associated with sustaining the infrastructure.
Speaking very clearly about the value of SOA, Joe McKendrick aptly reported on IBM's Steve Mills who laid down the gauntlet and challenged the audience to find him a company not interested in SOA principles.
Of course, when you attend a conference like IMPACT, you tend to expect announcements about new products, bold statements from the executives and shots from the competition (like the recent WebSphere challenge issued by Microsoft).
What I didn't expect to find among the sea of people were the lines of architects and developers waiting to take various certification tests. The lines were so deep you'd almost think Billy Crystal was administering the tests.
IBM offered certifications in WebSphere, SOA and XML and the folks over at ZapThink offered a SOA for Managers Certification Course. When you think about it, the interest makes sense. After all, these events really should be about the folks who actually use the technology to do their jobs.
Now you could argue that the lines are sign of the times as IT professionals beef up their resumes with additional certifications.
Though as I've mentioned before in this blog, regardless of the marketing term du jour (SOA, cloud, virtualization, etc.) IT professionals who have a mastery of the way that the architecture can reduce costs as well as the skills to execute on the strategy will always be in demand, regardless of the way the economy turns.
As for IMPACT 2010, there's already some buzz about it...
-Jeff
Labels: Automated Governance, IMPACT 2009, IMPACT 2010, SOA
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