Gartner Enterprise Architecture 2006 Conference Wrap-Up

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This year’s Integration and Enterprise Architecture Summit was overall pretty good. You can see a fundamental shift from the “Ivory Tower” EA that was discussed a few years to more of an iterative or pragmatic EA program. Taxonomies and methodologies are starting to mature.  It was also very clear that Financial Services dominated the conference compared to all other industries.

I presented at the conference where we had close to 150 attendees. The presentation focused on the macro level architecture concepts. This was to cover the breath of the interoperability challenges in Financial Services. From a show of hands 90% of the audience represented the Financial Services vertical. Based on the attendees list I presented to the majority if not all of the Financial Services attendees.

Mike Walker Presenting Interop in Financial Services at the Gartner Conference 2006

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My colleague in the Web Services team presented the micro level detail on a Life Based project we are working on employing the ACORD scenario with WS-* message exchange patterns. I also passed out the white paper I wrote describing this scenario and the architecture decisions around the challenges we ran into. I will post a link to this shortly.

I did find that the Gartner Predictions segments were out of touch with reality. For example on prediction was “70% of legacy 2006 Web Services will be rewritten in 2008”. The analyst could not qualify this statement at all. I thought we have been developing web services previously to this year…
Here are the key points of the show:

  • From the attendees list close to 50% of the conference was represented by Financial Services Organizations.
  • The Application Integration summit and the EA Summit had two distinct audiences
  • Application Integration had senior developers thru data architects and integration specialists
  • The EA summit had enterprise architects and CTO’s
  • The content delivered was still the same flavor as it was a year ago with one small exception. The concept of pragmatic SOA.
  • The good news here is that they are completely aligned with our messaging

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