Today was the real first day of Impact 2008. Jim Haney - CIO of Harley Davidson kicked off the conference, which successfully conveyed the message that the conference was about customers and users. The conference started with the event "The Smart SOA Approach Is Red Hot Globally." The event was a mixture of entertainment by Drew Carey and his team and presentations by IBM and its customers. Drew and his team were hilarious. The presentations were largely dull with a few important take away:

• Jim Haney showed a demo of a cool website they have created for users to plan their bike ride from point A to point B. The website uses web 2.0 technologies with underlying SOA infrastructure. The website was a good demonstration of the fact that SOA and web 2.0 are real and that they are here today

• Robert LeBlanc of IBM talked about business driven SOA and announced several vertical industry SOA frameworks e.g. SOA framework for Banking industry

• Tom Rosamilia of IBM talked about the technology supporting SOA and BPM. He announced two new products WebSphere Business Event and BPM Suite - both coming out in second quarter of this year. He stressed that there is a major focus on business events and also talked something about SOA Deployer. I am not sure whether SOA Deployer is a product 

While the opening event was interesting the very first session I attended was not. In SOA, Web 2.0, people interaction: End-user interaction with SOA session, Jon Rasiawski of IBM failed to make a connection between web 2.0 and SOA. The presentation started with usual "business is changing constantly" and "here are the challenges of CXO" stuff but failed to make a point of how web 2.0 and people interaction address those challenges. Everybody gets the value of SOA and everybody gets that it's all about customer experience, which can be greatly enhanced by web 2.0 but how are SOA and web 2.0 related? Why and how to think about them together? The session didn't discuss any of that. I did hear some good examples of how mashups can be used. I also heard of a product named Lotus Mashups, I am not sure whether it's a new product.

After the first session, I attended a lab - Business Process Management Problem Determination in WPS. A lab is a hands on session where attendees can follow written instructions in a mentored environment and learn by doing. The lab was great. It discussed how to setup a PMR with IBM in case of a problem, what information to include in the PMR and how to collect that information. The lab largely focused on turning on various logs and analyzing them. 

The last session I attended was IBM DataPower SOA Appliances: An Introduction by Christi Cain of IBM. The content was good but the presenter wasn't very effective. She didn't build the case for DataPower appliance and largely read from the slides. The appliance and ESB or message broker have overlapping functionality. I would have liked if they had covered when to use which. For most questions the answer was "It depends on what you have."

Outside the sessions the food was really boring - bunch of bad tasting salads, pastas and some meat items. It was not clear whether the entrée was vegetarian. My meat eating friends may have enjoyed the food. Tomorrow, I am attending more labs and some technical sessions.