Welcome Back!

As a huge fan of Calvin and Hobbes, one of my favorites was when he'd answer the phone by giving someone his pizza order, as if he had called them. In that vein, all I can say is "welcome back, where've you been?"

Actually, it's been quite busy over here at Actional, putting our push on for the end of fiscal '08 (Progress closes our fiscal year at the end of November), preparing for our next release (oooh, it's cool), and meeting all these new people at Progress who came over from IONA (welcome, and welcome back in at least two cases).

Though I've been quiet on the blog front, October was a busy month. In addition to two weeks off (I feel relaxed, thank you), I've been out there talking about governance of all sorts (SOA, Cloud Computing, and Data Governance). Some might think that with all this governance talk, we're all about governance, but in fact, Actional is just one component of an overall governance solution. Which is why you won't often hear us talk about governance -- except this past October.

So, please accept my apologies for the quiet blog and check out the following October events that recap '08 quite nicely, and give you a sense of where my head is as we turn to '09.

1. eBizQ Panel on Selling SOA Governance to a Skeptical Audience, check out Joe McKendrick's post on the event. Joe moderated the panel and there was some very emotional discussion by the very experienced panel members. If you really are having trouble "getting started" this Monday, you can read the full transcript. And, if that wasn't enough, make sure to register for the next event, Avoiding SOA Disillusionment.
2. Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Architecture. Check out my first podcast. Hopefully there'll be more. Turns out, this is a subject I'm quite passionate about because I see awesome potential if we can just unlock data across the enterprise without breaking the connection to the data owners.
3. DM Radio and Data Governance, the Mission Critical Mandate. An interesting perspective on governance, data governance. If you think governing a SOA is hard, listen to us talk about the challenges of governing the data. I think that's where it starts to get exciting.

And, stay tuned. I've just finished my copy of Todd Biske's book, "SOA Governance; The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization". It's a good book, I've even used the material in a couple of meetings. I'll be reviewing it shortly.