Eight for the price of two

Promising “eight days’ worth of education packed into two information-filled days” and “the no. 1 i-technology educational and networking opportunity of the year,” the 10th International SOA Web Services Edge Conference and the First Annual Enterprise Open Source Conference has been announced for a June 5-6 run in New York City. The list of conference faculty members is huge this year — over 100 are scheduled to lecture, engage in panel discussions, and / or hold classes on subjects such as AJAX, SOA, Web Services and Enterprise Open Source. The conference program promises to present a comprehensive view of all the development and management aspects of integrating SOA strategy and open source systems.

Scheduled keynote speakers include Cassatt founder / CEO Bill Coleman to kick things off; on Tuesday, it will be JBoss CEO Dr. Marc Fleury commenting extensively on enterprise open source options and principles. Fog Creek Software founder will give a keynote talk to be entitled “Making Truly Great, ‘Blue-Chip’ Software Products.” Two “power panels” will take place, led by SYS-CON Group publisher / editorial director Jeremy Geelan. Of course, attending discussions simultaneously remains impossible, the complete content from all the conference sessions will be recorded as a set of DVDs. This on-demand archive set carries a price tag of $995 and webcast archives also exist as sys-con.tv. Conference press material uses a statistic from the Gartner Group in order to emphasize the importance of such an education: According to the analyst firm, by 2008, “more than 60 percent of enterprises will use SOA as the guiding principle when creating mission-critical applications and processes.