Middleware 2006 - Keynotes

John Wilkes, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, USA

Title: Utilification Redux

Abstract: In 2004, I wrote: "Utility computing has the potential to revolutionize the way we purchase, organize, and distribute computational power and services. It will do so by offloading resource provisioning to centralized sites that can benefit from economies of scale, careful, failure-resilient construction, flexibility and changeability of hardware choices, and scalable and business-driven management techniques. But that promise is useless unless we can move applications from traditional computing environments into utility ones, where the applications are fronted by service interfaces and resource flexing is the norm."

The landscape has shifted somewhat since then: now, few doubt that service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are here to stay; the early emphasis on performance in utility computing is beginning to seem misplaced; and the non-performance "ilities" are going to need much more attention than they've been given so far.

In this talk, I'll look at how these ideas have changed how we should think about utilification -- and ask not what they can do for middleware, but what middleware can do for them.

Bio: John joined HPL in 1982 with a PhD from Cambridge University; his thesis work received the British Computer Society's Technology Award that year. He has decades of systems research experience and is well-known for his innovative work on storage management; he's also done work in operating systems and network interfaces. He founded the Storage Systems Department, and led it for many years. In 2001, while a member of the SNIA Technical Council, he received a SNIA Outstanding Achievement Award for creating the SNIA Shared Storage Model - a framework that captures the functional layers and properties of a storage system, regardless of the underlying design, product or installation. On the academic side, he was program chair for the prestigious 17th Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'99), and has been an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 1996 (at full professor level since 2002). He was made an HP fellow in September 2002, and elected to ACM Fellow later that same year. More recently, he has been focusing on the use of economic mechanisms to provide governance techniques for service-oriented architectures, with a particular bias towards self-managing approaches. John is named as inventor or co-inventor on about 60 patent applications.

Sean Baker, IONA, Ireland

Title: Middleware's Teenage Years

Abstract: There are great middleware products, so why is the middleware space so immature? This is not an attack on any individual, company or standard, but a statement on how we behave as a group. We have no consistency in the terminology we use (I'm sure you use terms consistently, but does everyone else?). Users get conflicting advice on key issues, which means that they are a lot less confident in making technology decisions. Surprisingly, given the role that middleware sets itself, interoperability between middleware products is difficult. We start multi-year campaigns across the whole industry - such as loosely coupling systems - without agreeing clear goals. Complementary approaches are declared to be rivals. The list goes on and on.

This talk takes a critical look at our industry, and focuses on a number of areas in which we need to improve.

Bio: Dr. Baker is Chief Corporate Scientist, a member of IONA's Board of Directors, and a Co-Founder of IONA. Sean is based in IONA's Dublin headquarters with responsibility for research activities and regular contributions to technical publications.

In the many years since IONA's founding, Dr. Baker has served in a variety of roles, including executive vice president of customer and professional services, and vice president of Applied Research. He was a key contributor to the IONA e-Business Platform™ strategy, and he played a significant role in the development of IONA's patent-pending Adaptive Runtime Technology.™ . He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) and has published a number of books and articles in the area of distributed computing. Before joining the industry, Dr. Baker held a tenured post in the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College, where he helped form the Distributed Systems Group in 1980.