Michael Wheaton (pictured), principal engineer at Sun, will be giving a session at SOA Web Services Edge 2007 that highlights why SOA Governance is crucial for the successful transition to SOA.

"SOA is becoming the prevailing choice for IT enterprises," notes Wheaton, "and the success of any transition to an SOA is based on quality of the SOA governance solution."

His session will discuss how to build policy enforcement contracts that can customize how service consumers and producers are able interact with existing enterprise services. Wheaton will also explore how enterprise architects and developers can build and leverage an SOA governance strategy in order to manage, share, and enforce policies around the key service artifacts across the enterprise. He will additionally show how to effectively manage the design, execution, and management aspects of the governance infrastructure. 

Wheaton has 15-plus years of experience in the computer industry. He is a subject matter expert in Service Oriented Architectures and is responsible for driving vision, training and the development of customer solution offerings around SOA for Sun. For the past nine years, he has led and mentored key Sun customers on the integration of evolving technologies into the corporate enterprise. As chief architect he has led projects across a wide range of vertical markets with some of Sun's largest customers. He is a frequent speaker at a wide rage of events.

In his session, called "Decorating Your SOA Services with Governance Enforcement Contracts," Wheaton will focus on tips, best practices, and strategies on how to develop policy enforcement contracts that can be decorated across internal or external services in the enterprise enhancing the value of the SOA.

The following SOA governance strategies and best practices will be addressed:

Service classification and taxonomies for publishing and discovering services.

Managing the service life cycle Addressing Version Management and method customizing.

Policy definition and management of non functional systemic qualities.
Creation and usage of governance contracts with enterprise services.

Applying governance contracts to ESBs, BPM, and Identity infrastructures.