Thoughts from The WebSphere Tech Exchange Opening Session

The screens may not have been readable, but the message was clear. The WebSphere business model is clearly wrapped around Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Many times the term SOA Governance was thrown out, but it is not clear from my discussion with an IBMer that they may have missed the boat in mapping SOA to overall IT Governance. In fact, there is no IT Governance track as promised on the conference web site, they really meant SOA Governance, which from our conversation, has a totally different definition. It also became clear that people in the Lotus community need to get started getting smart about SOA as it is all about composite applications, which is where Hannover is supposed to take the IBM Lotus Notes & Domino User Base. As I attend more SOA sessions (I am sitting in "Getting Started with SOA" now), I hope to hear a much clearer linkage.