At the last session of Prolifics University today, it was so exciting to hear about all the latest technologies.

As someone who sometimes builds situational applications, hearing Joe Lea talk about WebSphere sMash -- the outgrowth of IBM's Project Zero -- was particularly interesting. Based on Web 2.0 technologies, you can easily implement those smaller applications with some scripting and basic Web development skills. Provide blogs, forums, feeds and Google gadgets for collaboration and information sharing.

Complex business event processing was a continuation of yesterday's discussion about SOA monitoring. The advantage of WebSphere Business Events is that different kinds of business events--prospect deliveries, supply chain deliveries, web site visits, live chat conversations, calls to customer service, weather reports, and so on--that were previously unconnected, disparate items can now be correlated and evaluated so that the appropriate response can be taken. And, in another theme for the day, this can be done with a minimum of involvement from IT. Whether your interest is increasing your sales opportunities, fraud detection, or resource management, you can benefit from improvements in complex business event processing.

WebSphere Virtual Enterprise helps you use your resources more effectively. By combining Server Virtualization with Application Infrastructure Virtualization, organizations can achieve hardware and energy savings as well as reductions in maintenance costs and unplanned outages. With Application Infrastructure Virtualization, you separate applications from the physical infrastructure that they run on so that they can be placed or migrated across a pool of application server resources. By monitoring the health of your servers and defining health conditions and actions, you can prevent unplanned outages. By setting application service policies, you can ensure that the applications affecting your revenue are given the highest priority in system resources. And this type of efficiency is not just for larger organizations. Even with a small number of servers, you can still gain substantial financial benefits.

Tom Inman's presentation on Information On Demand gave those of us at Prolifics University a front row seat to IBM's recent announcements about an Information Agenda. In today's world, organizations are wanting to move beyond business automation to business optimization. Using information initiatives to help your business get the speed and flexibility that is needed in order to transform information into a trusted strategic asset that can give you a sustained competitive advantage.

If you were unable to join us for Prolifics University, replays will be available from the Prolifics University site at www.prolificsuniversity.com. Thanks to all of our customers and speakers for participating in a great week!

I have to confess -- the first time I saw a demo of IBM's Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM), I was totally impressed. Its ability to give you levels of visibility into your application performance has enormous implications on how you diagnose and fix performance issues. Need to improve your SLAs? Set up alerts to notify you before the help desk is flooded with calls. Are some transactions taking much longer than they should? ITCAM lets you deep dive to find out if it is the server, the database or some other issue. From within the tool, you can even examine the performance of EJBs and method calls. Since ITCAM arms you with information, you can assign the task to the specific group or SME in charge of the problem. Since I saw my first ITCAM demo , the tools have continued to evolve so that they now encompass MQ channels.

On the business process side, Business Activity Monitoring lets you create dashboards that report on your business processes. Giving you real-time updates on how your business is performing with dashboards that can be customized based on your role. Business analysts need access to the tasks, the workflow and the business rules affecting business processes. Executives need real-time reporting capabilities.

Tomorrow the discussion on Business Activity Monitoring will continue with the presentation on Business Events. Join us for Where is SOA Going: Web 2.0, Business Events, Virtualization, Information On Demand. See you then!

Security of your IT applications and data. A hot topic that continues to be in the headlines. Not only from the standpoint of security issues and breaches, but also from the growing regulations that mandate standards for data access and storage.

Today's presentation from Prolifics' Mike Hastie illustrated how some Prolifics customers have implemented security solutions. Using Tivoli Access Manager to provide single sign-on capabilities and Tivoli Identity Manager to easily manage access to your networks and applications. Using WebSphere DataPower, SOA/XML appliances known for performing message transformation at wirespeed, to also provide encryption/decryption, message authentication and policy management of Web services.

Whatever security solution you implement, the main lesson that I got from today's presentation is to avoid doing security as an afterthought. This is even more important in an SOA context where services are meant to be easily accessed and reused. Security needs to be part of the design of your applications and services as well as the deployment. Which is where tomorrow's topic -- SOA Monitoring: Making it 24x7 -- also plays a part. Hope you'll join us!

Build to last. Build for change. In the past, the motto for application developers was "build to last." Unfortunately, by the time some applications were deployed, the business processes that would use those applications had radically changed. That is one of the reasons SOA initiatives are so popular. It offers a way for enterprise applications to be flexible and responsive to changing business needs.

But with such a high level of change, you need a way to manage it. Which is where SOA Governance comes in. Governance can specify your policies, standards and responsibilities in addition to providing a way for team members to communicate and work together.

In today's presentation, Greg Hodgkinson started with the reasons for SOA governance and then led us through the experiences of the fictional Acme Ltd. company starting its first SOA initiative for its supply chain systems. Needless to say, there were challenges along the way, but SOA goverance tools and procedures helped Acme find the road to success.

Addressing SOA Governance might also be your next step. In this "build for change" world, you need governance tools and objectives to measure your progress, your effectiveness, and your successes.

Prolifics University kicked off in style with our keynote speaker - Sandy Carter, VP of SOA and WebSphere Marketing at IBM! Sandy's informative presentation on What SOA Can Do For You – Integration and BPM discussed the business drivers leading to SOA as well as the different entry points for SOA projects.

CEOs everywhere recognize the need for change in order to build flexibility and efficiency into their business processes. Did you know that in the US the typical carrot travels 1,600 miles to get from the farm to your plate? That's just one example of how business processes can improve. SOA is the architecture to take you there.

By interweaving customer stories throughout the presentation, Sandy showed us how SOA is moving forward in organizations around the world. Current statistics report that 53% of companies have already started with SOA and 37% will begin SOA projects in the next 1-2 years.

Today's presentation ended with some of the key lessons learned. Choose the right pilot project with senior level sponsorship. Focus on the people and end-to-end business requirements. Don't go it alone! Leverage the lessons learned across the industry. (If you need some guidance, Prolifics and IBM can help.) Spend the time to establish a governance process.

BTW, that last lesson is a great lead-in for tomorrow's session - SOA Governance: People Processes and Projects. Hope to see you then!

Have you registered for Prolifics University yet? With SOA you can create an environment which is fully integrated, uses your existing assets, and enables fast, flexible deployment of business processes. Join us this week for Building End-to-End SOA and find out how to take the next step in your SOA strategy.

Monday - Prolifics University ’08 kicks off with a bang featuring Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels, Sandy Carter, as she weaves together business drivers and their influence on SOA, BPM, and Connectivity. Find out what SOA can do for you.

Tuesday - Already on your path to a solid SOA infrastructure? Just getting started? Wherever you are in your SOA roadmap, you’ll need to know how to manage people, processes and projects. Governance is a vital part of SOA and what model you use can make all the difference in the world.

Wednesday -Securing your internal and external systems has never been more important as indicated by the daily horror stories in the news. Lack of compliance with regulations can adversely affect your wallet and business reputation. Learn how to keep your company from becoming tomorrow’s headline!

Thursday - Monitoring your SOA infrastructure is crucial in maintaining the highest level of efficiencies and making smarter business decisions. Having systems in place to play detective 24/7 can give you significant performance insight – on both operational and business levels. Learn how to determine where your bottlenecks and problem areas are, and how to make better informed business decisions and re-position your organization to take full advantage of emerging opportunities.

Friday - Prolifics University concludes by looking ahead at what hot topics are here today and will be integral in your SOA infrastructure tomorrow. Web 2.0, Business Events, Virtualization and Information on Demand aren’t just buzzwords – they can take your company and its resources above and beyond your competitors and help you carve a niche within your industry.

Register at http://www.prolificsuniversity.com/register.html

See you there!