As you may of seen on my LinkedIn profile (www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanwoodward) , after 11 years at SunGard I am moving on to pastures new at Detica (www.detica.com).  I start next week and I am very much looking forward to it and the new challenges this brings.

Well the first user group went very well last week (17th July) at Cardinal Place in London. Thanks to all that attended and helped make the 1st session a success.

We had over 30 people registered for the event and around 25 attend, which is fantastic. Reflecting, we have probably one of the most influential UK user groups I know relating to Microsoft  SOA & BPM eco-system as the group contains

- Most if not all of the UK Biztalk MVPs

- Many of the UK companies that sit on the Connected System Division Advisor group

- Most of the key UK SOA BPM Integrators

- Most of the key UK SOA BPM Partners

- Many of the major companies that have/are implementing SOA BPM projects with Microsoft

We currently have 80+ people registered on the website and this is growing daily.

Please go to www.sbug.org.uk for details and to join the conversation. Slide Decks etc will be uploaded in the next few days.

We are looking for lots of feedback and to ensure that many more people can attend the face-to-face sessions.

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With 7,500 partners, 2,500 MS staff  attending this years partner conference in Houston, with over 500+ from the UK, numbering around 300 partner organisations making the trip, its one big event.

Not a huge amount of new technology but a strong message and push from the conference was around Software + Services, and how partners should start to get ready, especially as MS starts to offer cloud services.

Microsoft to sell hosted service subscriptions for $3 a month*

This service will be coming to the UK circa mid 2009.

The whole on-premise, hosted and MS in-the-cloud offering offers choice to customers, BUT for anything other than simple scenarios  I see End to End business process orchestration requiring further thought

- Modelling your business process delivery as it spans on-premise and in the cloud, and keeping your hands around it (SLAs, Governance etc) becomes more complex

- Cloud based integration platforms that manage the orchestration of your cloud services and connect back to your on-premise integration layer are not yet mature (MS Biztalk Services are in beta)

This mixed delivery, does bring customer choice, but in some instances will bring complexity.

* (courtesy of Jo Foley’s blog)

I attended the Gartner SOA Conference in London a few days ago.  The conference, which was claimed to be the largest agnostic SOA Conference in Europe, had around 400 attendees from around Europe, with key markets being FinServ, Manufacturing and Public Sector.

A key highlight for me was the presentation by George Glass, Chief Architect at BT, where he explained how the transition to SOA had occured.  Although the scale of the SOA project was massive and highly complex (3500 applications being managed), the most interesting messages where around how BT had managed to adopt SOA and embed it into the culture through exec sponsorship, a series of carrots and sticks, including linking re-use to bonus’s and most importantly a single vision of the future.

Another highlight was the Deputy CTO of Software AG, Miko Matsumura, who provided some key insights/stories into migrating towards SOA.

A key theme of the conference was around Cloud Computing and this was also clear when I talked with many of the sponsors around their future vision.  The Cloud is coming and will be a key disruptor within the Enterprise in the years to come.