Roman's miles

IT Regional Architect Conference. Feedback from Atlanta.

As I announced in the past I've attended the conference in Atlanta. It was the first event of a series in US and the organizers plan to have it annually in the same format. Below is my impression.

First off, it was a great success! To my knowledge it's the only conference which is vendor or technology agnostic. Not only it is cross-platform and cross-technology it's focused on the architecture issues and built for architects. Not developers or sysadmins but enterprise, infrastructure, and software architects.

Secondly, for a local conference (by the way, participation cost is just $500 which is absolutely exceptional for such events) there were about 250 participants that again demonstrates success of the first event. It was quite an efficient networking event to rub shoulders with local folks.

Thirdly, the keynotes speakers were real stars and they rocked! Angela, Mike, Scott, and Rick all presented a very valuable topics and were great speakers. A very sound composition of the speaker - another complement to the organizers.

Lastly, I advise you to go to the next event in Atlanta or other cities and wish IASA to rise the bar next time bringing new speakers and more participants.

Technorati tags: IASA, software architect, MDM

Come to a "IT Architect Regional Conference 2007"

International Association of Software Architects hosts a series of IT Architect Regional Conferences at Atlanta, GA, San Diego, CA, and Washington, D.C on Sept 13-14, Oct 15-16, and Oct 8-9 correspondingly. The organizers' idea is instead of having one expensive national event leading to substantial travel expenses to host the conference three times in the country attracting much more visitors. Scott Amber gives the key notes on the conferences which makes it automatically as of a serious caliber.

You can click on the charter of your geographical preferences above and check the agenda. Many great speakers from the industry (software houses, consultants, and customers) present at the event and you'll find it difficult to pick up a topic of your interest from four concurrent tracks.

I'm presenting MDM at Atlanta and the capital - MDM "MDM - where business meets IT". I'm planning to talk about the problems MDM comes to resolve, why it's vital for today's business to address them, and what make an enterprise want to buy a ready solution instead of developing an in-house one. I'm planning to split marchitecture and tarchitecture as 1:5 (at least) so the geeks in the audience should not get too bored with ROI, TCO, and other exciting stuff.

Come to listen lead industry architects, learn something new, and rub shoulders with you colleagues. It's gonna be fun.

Technorati tags: IASA, software architect, MDM

Meeting at TechEd's

Although I've published my near travel plans now can't miss an opportunity to put a cool banner on the blog.

See you in Vegas and Munich.

Technorati tags: SAP, Teched

    

Welcome to SAPPHIRE '07 Atlanta

The coming Sapphire in Atlanta is the first without Shai since I've joined SAP. It's the first Sapphire after we announced the A1S strategy and the first when we've started delivering on Enterprise SOA. The coming  event has been echoing in the blogosphere (Vinnie, Jason) and is promising to get lots of attentions of analysts and top blog writers. I'll drop a few lines on how it looked from inside.

I'll be assisting at the Discovery System pod and invite my readers to stop by and say hello:-)

Technorati tags: SAPPHIRE07, SAP, SAPPHIRE

What am I doing at SAP?

I found myself answering this question many times introducing my group and myself in real life; recently I've been getting many emails asking the same question - so I thought why not to blog about my team and my role at SAP?

I work in Solution Office of the New Product Introduction group. It's a global group presented in North America, Europe, Israel, and Asia Pacific. There are just a couple of dozens folks in the team but all came with a sound background in ABAP, Java, or .NET and brought many years of experience in a variety of technologies.

The mission of the group is told  in its name. When SAP introduces new products (not just new releases of the existing ones) it may take some time until all the major divisions inside the company get up to speed with the products: we need to iterate the products through a series of adjustments accommodating cusotmers' needs and consummating solutions, educate project and sales forces, enable the ecosystem, and gain mind and market share. I don't want to call this phase "crossing the chasm" but it's a very critical period for a new product and while it does its first steps outside of the labs the product needs a team fostering and supporting it. This is a team behaving like a task-force unit. Again bringing a military analogy such a mobile group reacting in an agile and sensitive mode isn't burdened by revenue, utilization, or any other rigid KPI and can do whatever is needed for a product's success (comparing to SAP's armies of consulting, education services, sales forces, etc. using an approach of scalability and targeting revenue generation).

I'm leading a team of architects and experts in the Solution Office driving MDM - Master Data Management. Our mission is to provide customer success on early project implementations, enable internal project forces and the ecosystem of partners with knowledge and experience gained in the projects, roll-in  the feedback to the R&D, assure solution awareness among our customers and partners, develop solutions on top of the product, and do everything is needed to warrant product success. We closely work with other groups of the NPI virtual team (more than 15 different divisions), engage in pre-sales activities, bootstrap projects, assist in evaluating solutions, present the product at different conferences, evangelize the solutions on customer and partner events - so the team knows the product inside-out which helps us to identify the gaps, propose, and carry out solutions.

With only a handful of people in the team we've reached this year lots of things. We've worn a hat of consultant (proposing solutions for customer ), a solution architect (evaluating architectures with project teams), a trainer (preparing and teaching classes), an analyst (brainstorming with customers ways to resolve problems), a bizdev guy (creating  solutions on top of the product and educating partners), a sales man (pitching the solution in front of customers), and many others internally. The only our criterion for a task to be taken by the team is a company-wise impact. Our group doesn't exist to replace any other team although often a task can be dispatched to another team. At the same time usually there is no time, or enough expertise acquired by the the other team, or a shortage of resources, or they have other priorities. So we take the task on our shoulders, build a solution, and later - to achieve scalability and a massive impact - roll it out to an appropriate owner in the company.

We cherish (or boost?) a new product for about 12-18 months and when it reaches its maturity and simultaneously other teams acquire necessary experience the product departures from our radar giving in its place to the next one.

It's a very interesting group to work in with tons of dynamics and wide exposure to other teams in SAP. It's also a very unique position for touching non technical areas of our industry (such as marketing, business development, sales, consulting, training, etc.) without loosing contact with  our technical background. The only disadvantage one (but not we) may find is intensive travels. Some of us have spent about 100 nights outside of the homes this year and flown more than 100K miles but with the majority of international destinations it's hardly perceived as punishment:-)

Technorati tags: SAP, NPI

SOA is around us

I've been running recently across a couple of discussions on what SOA is and thought it would make sense to re-post my old corporate blog on the topic here. This time I just change SOA's old name - ESA - to the new one.

A few days ago I went to my DMVS (department of motor vehicle) center to get my driver’s license. I went to the closest exam center, which is in Norcross, to take a written and hopefully a road test. For those who’ve never been there, the visitor’s area is a big hall with 20 counters, 3 big screens with numbers running on them, many seats and hundreds of visitors. I was told it serves between 400 and 700 people a day. Staying in the line hearing almost incessant announcments and looking at visitors and inspectors dashing about I had a firm sensation that all this very much reminded me something. Guess what?! – right, SOA! I was looking at every element of the interaction and more and more was becoming sure that this is quite a strong implementation of SOA, not in software but our real life. Let me explain.

As you get to the center a big guide sign meets you: “ALL visitors to the info desk!”. This is a Dispatcher-Controller pattern. The Dispatcher lady accepts all visitors and after giving basic instructions (“we accept only cash!”) and checking your docs (“where is your address proving bill?”) redirects you to a queue and assigns you a unique (ordinal) number. By the way, there are two-three ladies at the desk so there is scalability and availability in place! After you get your number you’re put in one of about a dozen virtual queues (or workflows) for your needs: passing tests, changing address, getting license back after revoking and so on. Every such purpose has its own workflow with special rules residing to it.

So each visitor becomes an “object” routing between different services according to a specific workflow and notified by proper messages. Such coordination is hidden from visitors but happens "behind the scenes" in a workflow managing system. This is the Dynamic Router pattern – the heart of the system. This Dynamic Router knows where to send you on the next step of your workflow depending on your results of the previous one. You’re advancing from service to service (from counter to counter) when your number is announced and it appears on those big screens I mentioned before. What about services? They’re supplied by brave DMVS employees standing at the 20 counters. They’re grouped by the functionality they supply and serve the next “object” in a service queue. For instance some fill out your form and verify the docs you brought. Others take your signature, fingerprints, and your photo. A third performs vision checks and so forth. Every service knows how to carry out its own operation. It neither cares where you came from nor does it know where you will go after. All it knows is to double check your “input parameters” perform its operation then “return some result” and finally “log” it to the system.

What is cool is you don’t worry about where to go next, either! The Dynamic Router service takes care about you. In practice you wait for your number to appear on the screens showing you the next counter to attend and announced by an electronic voice (“number A485 at counter 17”). You’re sitting and waiting. Now what about collision resolving? What if you lost your number? What if you missed your queue? In such a case you come to the Dispatcher lady which enqueues you again to the workflow hopefully to the point right after the last stage you successfully have passed. Big hint: messages can expire. A friend of mine, after successful passing her driving test, couldn’t wait to get the license and took all the documents home. When she came back a day after, the Dispatcher lady didn’t allow her to enter the queue on the last stage. Sorry, Sarit:-( So she had to start her workflow from scratch and thankfully she passed it again (now to the end of the workflow:-)

What about scalability availability and performance, you’ll ask? As I said every service is scalable over several counters. And hence available. Performance at Norcross was quite impressive (I came there at 10.30am successfully passed my both tests and at 1.30pm went out with my license in hands). Everything was functioning fine and fast. I like our projects implemented in a similar way:-) Not that I wish you to attend a DMVS center. But if you have to, pay attention to this brilliant SOA implementation and good luck with your tests!

Technorati tags: SOA, ESA, enterprise, software