The SOA Consortium

I attended the SOA Consortium in Crystal City, Virginia on March 12 and 13. This group of people are identifying the major business-driven SOA activities and drafting advice on how to plan and execute those activities. The framework will be a publicly available, online resource. Their intent is to iterate content delivery over the course of 2008. The initial launch was targeted for March 2008. I am not sure if they will make this date since it is already the month of March. Initial launch will focus on the framework itself, a high-level description of the project and framework, and individual activity descriptions and their relevance to SOA. Throughout 2008, the group will incrementally add content for each framework activity.

The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. Members of the SOA Consortium are listed below. The SOA Consortium is managed by the Object Management Group.

The Practical Guide to Federal Service Oriented Architecture (PGFSOA) Semantic Media Wiki (SMW) site is at ( http://smw.osera.gov/pgfsoa/index.php/Welcome ).

The members of the steering committee are listed at: ( http://www.soa-consortium.org/steering-committee.htm ).

Organizational membership to the consortium is $5,000 annually. The average time commitment for active members is 5 hours a month. This includes call participation and contribution to working group deliverables. The SOA Consortium is not a standards organization–it is an advocacy group.

I do think it is absolutely worthwhile to get involved with this consortium. They have quarterly meetings. Upcoming meetings are:

• June 25-26, 2008 in Ontario Canada
• September 24-25, 2008 in Orlando, Florida
• December 10-11 in Santa Clara, California

I hope to get some podcasts and powerpoint briefings from the conference.

Again, I definitely think this is something to pursue and I would be willing to commit to five hours a month plus quarterly meetings. It would be good exposure for Northrop Grumman.