The final part of the 3-part series showcasing Oracle Enterprise Manager SOA Management capabilities.

This demonstration gives you an overview of monitoring SOA composites using Enterprise Manager Grid Control. You can monitor SOA composites with Enterprise Manager Grid Control when you purchase the SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition.

View Demo

Part 2 of the 3-part series featuring Enterprise Manager SOA Management Pack

This demonstration gives you an overview of SOA configuration management using Enterprise Manager Grid Control. You can perform SOA configuration management with Enterprise Manager Grid Control when you purchase the SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition.

View the demo

This demonstration gives you an overview of monitoring SOA infrastructure components using Enterprise Manager Grid Control. You can monitor SOA components with Enterprise Manager Grid Control when you purchase the SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition.

View the demo

Watch this space for more such demos.

The Oracle IDM team has a solution to password-dementia. Warning: It’s funny!

Today most employees have multiple user names and passwords across the enterprise. A single call to the help desk can cost as much as $25 to reset passwords. If users are having trouble remembering passwords, things can get a little out of hand.

Oracle PartnerNetwork would like to invite you to a FREE 2 day ORACLE ENTERPRISE GATEWAY Business and Technical Seminar which is taking place from 20th & 21st September 2011 in Oracle Reading, UK.

Description

This event is targeted at Partner organisations working with, or evaluating the possibility of using/deploying Oracle Enterprise Gateway. The event will consist of Business and Technical tracks for sales and technical personnel. It will show how business benefits can be delivered to your customers, increase revenue for your organisation and understand key product features, installation and deployment.

Oracle Enterprise Gateway (OEG), a purpose-built gateway product offering, simplifies and secures SOA deployments on-premise or in the cloud. It secures and expedites XML, Web Services and other types of data in a simple, easy-to-use manner addressing common SOA bottlenecks. Oracle Enterprise Gateway is a standards-based, policy-driven, standalone software security solution that provides first line of defense in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments.

Oracle Enterprise Gateway provides following key functionality:

• Provide DMZ-Class Security

• Provide Ultra-Fast XML Processing

• Integrate and Extend to 3rd party systems

• Enhance Service Governance

Topics covered

• What are the challanges of SOA deployments in enterprises?

• How does Oracle Enterprise Gateway add value and benefit to the end customer

• How do you sell Oracle Enterprise Gateway to Oracle and non-Oracle customers

• Oracle Enterprise Gateway High Level Architecture

• Oracle Enterprise Gateway Product Features

• Hands on product installation

• Configuration and customization

Registration

To register, please click on the link below. This will direct you to our online registration system. You will be prompted to log on to OPN with your usual partner login and password.

PLEASE NOTE: In order to complete the registration you will need your OPN agreement name. If you do not have this information contact the Oracle University Partner Education Hotline at 0118 92 40700 or if you are calling from outside the UK +44 118 92 40700.

If you have any queries regarding this event please call us on 0118 92 40700 or email parted_uk@oracle.com.

REGISTER HERE – 20th & 21st September 2011 – Reading 

Cloud computing is changing how enterprises look at end-to-end IT operations. As cloud adoption soars, CIOs want to “police the cloud” to ensure business-critical manageability and governance. IDN ‘Expert Voices’ speaks with Cathy Lippert, Director of Oracle SOA Governance, to learn how SOA Governance is being tuned for Cloud Governance, including security, policy compliance and even SLAs.

View the podcast and download slides   

We regularly receive questions about available options for learning Oracle SOA Suite. This material by Demed L’Her & team is definitely worth a blog post.

In-person and online classes

The best option to learn about anything new is of course through an in-person class. Oracle University offers several learning paths for Oracle SOA Suite. The starting point for these classes was an internal training that our product management team put together to get Oracle employees ready for the 11g release. Our curriculum organization then took over, polished, formalized and fleshed out the course. It’s quite amazing to see how things can take a life of their own and that literally thousands of people around the world have now gone through these classes!

There are 4 main learning paths identified:

1. Architect
2. Analyst
3. Developer
4. Administrator

These learning paths consist of various related classes (WebLogic, XML, etc.) and specific SOA classes:

1. Essential Concepts
2. Build Composite Applications
3. Administration
4. Design & Integrate Services

Head to the Oracle University page for Oracle SOA and BPM for more information on these learning paths and available classes. Classes are available around the world as you can see on the course catalog and schedule (http://education.oracle.com  > Course Schedule). Note that these classes are also available as online "Self-Study Courses" if you cannot travel for a reason or another and that Oracle University can also deliver on-premise classes (an interesting option when you want to train a whole team on the technology).

Books

Another thing I am quite proud of is the number of books available today on Oracle SOA Suite. As of this writing there is a dozen of books directly related to Oracle SOA Suite. When it comes to books I have to admit that I am somehow biased since I co-authored one of them. With this disclaimer in place, if you ask me what are the books I would recommend to a developer looking at learning Oracle SOA Suite I would say:

1. "Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 – A Hands-On Tutorial" is, as its name indicates, a technical introduction
   to SOA Suite. Its focus is on explaining, through a comprehensive
   tutorial, how the various components relate to each other and can be
   brought together to build a complete solution. 
2. Once you understand what is available in SOA Suite you should acquire a
   more detailed and complete book. There are multiple options there such
   as Lucas Jellema’s "SOA Suite 11g Handbook" or "Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 Developer’s Guide" by Matt Wright and Antony Reynolds. If you are solely working with the Oracle Service Bus then there are also dedicated books for this such as the one written by the OSB development team, "Oracle Service Bus (Expert’s Voice)" or the brand new "Oracle Service Bus Development Cookbook" by Guido Schmutz & al.

Check out the other books available on Oracle SOA Suite that cover topics such as implementation stories/patterns or administration.

Other educational material

There are other online assets that you can use to further your learning of Oracle SOA Suite. None of these can or try to replace a training or a book; you should look at them as source of complementary information on specific topics.

1. The Oracle SOA Suite product page on the Oracle Technical Network: maintained by the product management team this is the place to download the product, documentation library etc. Do not miss the "Advanced Technical Information" page; it’s easy to miss but a great repository of the best technical whitepapers etc.
2. The Service-Oriented Architecture Technology Center page on OTN. A place to track usage and applications of SOA across all Oracle products.
3. There is a number of Oracle By Example (OBEs) modules created for Oracle SOA Suite. They are task-oriented and usually very narrow in scope.
4. Oracle partners have even more options available to them through for instance the SOA certification process which we will describe in a subsequent post
5. Last but not least, there are many great user blogs out there on Oracle SOA Suite. I will share my blog roll in an upcoming post as this is a topic on itself!

Please comment on other useful sources of information you might have found on Oracle SOA Suite.

I know that it has been a long time since my last post, just though that I would update you my latest thoughts of Governance.

I just recently completed an executive round table series on EA and Cloud in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. The response was phenomenal. The key point of the session was that Enterprise is the key enabler of innovation – All companies want to drive to be market leaders, EA can lay the foundation for the path to deliver that at innovation.

When it comes to innovation, I see two distinct types:
(a) Passive innovation is where a company creates innovation thought increments improvement over time. A great example is when airlines went from paper tickets to electronic ticket. Next logical progression is to do the same with boarding passes. There are a lot of examples to choose from, thought the thing to keep in mind, is that passive innovation will only keep you in the lead, it won’t allow you to create new markets or jump from #3 to #1 in one go. For that we need another type of innovation.

(b) Disruptive innovation is where you create market where none existed before. Thought very difficult to do and requires significant investment in research, product and software development and not least of all, visionary thinking and timing, if done correctly, can turn the world on it’s ear. A great example is Apple iTunes. Some might say that this is incremental innovation, but only in one aspect, the downloading of music. Other then that, it’s all disruptive innovation. Being able to buy a single song rather then the album fundamentally changed the way we get out music.

Behind all of these types of innovation is Enterprise Architecture. EA creates the infrastructure foundation, then delivery systems and the end-user experience to deliver this innovation.

At Oracle, we are driving that EA innovation with our private cloud offerings from “bolt-to-glass” as I like to say. For more on what Oracle has to offer in EA and cloud, have a look at Cloud Computing | Oracle and Enterprise Architecture – Oracle

I am working on new material that I will be posting in a couple of weeks, so check back regularly for new updates or feel free to subscript for updates.

While I have not yet embarked on writing another book, I have been published in a second book. The publisher of my book on SOA Governance, Packt Publishing, has released their first compendium title called, “Do more with SOA Integration: Best of Packt.” It features content from several of their SOA books and authors, including some from my book on SOA Governance. If you’re looking for a book that covers a more broader perspective on SOA, but has some great content on SOA Governance as a bonus, check it out.

On a related note, I’ve been toying with the idea of authoring another book, this time on Enterprise Architecture. There are certainly EA books on the market, so I’m interested in whether all of you think there are some gaps in the books available. If I did embark on this project, my goal would be similar to my goal on my SOA Governance book: keep it easily consumable, yet practical, pragmatic, and valuable. That’s part of the reason that I chose the management fable style for SOA Governance, as a story is easier to read than a reference manual. If I can find a suitable story around EA, I may choose the same approach. Please send me your thoughts either by commenting on this post, or via email or LinkedIn message. Thanks for your input.