The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

I haven't blogged here for awhile, but this week I'm at the Gartner IT/XPO conference and I thought I would capture some of what I'm hearing. The theme is "rapid results, faster ROI". Gartner seems to think that we are poised on a revolution of IT (I think it's been going on for a while), where projects can't take a year and we need to transition to more SOA.

So I agree that projects can't take a year. Most of our projects don't, they are more on the order of weeks, a lot of tweaking of what is already in place. In the web world the requirements are ever changing and our stakeholders often can't completely visualize what they want, not to mention that they change their mind. In all fairness they are just reacting to a changing marketplace. It's way better to prototype something, get the stakeholders to validate what you are doing and schedule the additional features for quarterly rollout. Upper management is way happier when they see tangible results.

One of the interesting things about attending one of these is finding out what your own company is doing. If you are doing SOA, you might need to abstract out the communications between your clients and services using an ESB (enterprise service bus) layer. Turns out Sun has open-ESB project on java.net, check it out