Six presentations given at the SOA Consortium meeting related in various ways to Service Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management, and Master Data Management.
* Clay Richardson (Forrester) presented "lean BPM" trends, which include BPM-as-a-Service, lightweight BPM using mashups, and replacing the "waterfall mindset" with agility.
* Ryan Gates (Appiam) talked about the value of a BPM suite to do rapid application development, and gave advice on how to choose and conduct a BPM pilot.
* Marc Redemann (IDS Scheer) presented a case study of business transformation at Deutsche Bank, and told us about a free version of IDS's ARIS BPM product, ARIS Express.
* Olivier Brousseau (Schlumberger) described the company's journey toward "Information for Excellence," which combines aspects of SOA, MDM, usability, and other architectural elements into a list of ten requirements for all IT systems.  The audience appreciated the pragmatic approach and the concrete examples.
* Fred Cummins (HP) considers SOA as an architectural pattern that applies to the business itself as well as to IT. This would support the need, especially in a large organization, for shared functional service centers.
* Aleks Buterman (SenseAgility) explained how BPM, SOA and MDM can help "defuse the business model mismatches" between the organizations involved in a merger or acquisition.

DDS is a data-centric publish-and-subscribe mechanism with sophisticated quality-of-service controls that make it interesting for real-time and embedded systems. For example, a visualization client can tell a server "give me a data point every half-second" instead of getting a much faster data stream, most of which ends up being thrown away. An alert application can say "send me temperature data, but only if greater than 120 degrees." Different clients can request different QoS's on the same data stream.
The underlying Real-Time Publish-Subcriber (RTPS) protocol allows multiple vendors' DDS implementations to interoperate.
The specification, written by a group that included France-based Thalès and US-based RTI, was adopted by OMG in 2003, but acceptance seems to now be gaining with applications to the military and transportation domains.

As the SOA Consortium completes its mission to promote SOA adoption, the OMG is launching a "Business Ecology Initiative" related to sustainable business processes. This new initiative is potentially being positioned as an "umbrella" over whatever will evolve from the current BPM and SOA consortia, but discussions at the San Antonio meeting indicate that this is confusing or non- intuitive to many people. Better business processes may certainly streamline IT and use less resources (e.g., by eliminating paper invoices), but BPM and SOA are not justified only by "green IT" concerns.
The dust should settle soon, and we will hopefully end up with a clear and agreed-upon way to influence future IT standards and practices so they contribute to a reduced environmental impact.

The above highlights are written from a 9-page report I wrote on the fly during the SOA Consortium meetings. If you are interested in the full report, please contact me.

"Because of the rampant spread of the magic quadrant syndrome, I have come to deeply distrust the number 4. I have also come to distrust the belief that all good things are upwards and to the right. I now tend to associate anything in that quadrant with things that float away."