So today is apparently the final day of the SOA Jam at Impact 2008. Overall I saw a few overall themes in the ideas:

• Ideas on how to engage the business with SOA
• Tons of Ideas on How to create a “Smart SOA” community
• Ideas for needed case studies mostly from a generic non-provider viewpoint.

The one I’m most enthusiastic about is creating a community, so it was nice to see the largest proportion of ideas occur around it. I guess the ball is now in IBM’s court to begin the next steps towards resolution. I’d sure like to know (and be involved) in as much as possible but I’m going to assume these things will occur behind closed-confidential doors.

Overall, the SOA Jam turned in 73 ideas with 289 comments. We started off with 22 ideas and 70 comments, then 44 ideas and 146 comments. There was a real explosion of activity yesterday with double the usual 70 comments. I don’t know why IBM decided to end the jam a day early. I’m hoping it’s because there’s some kind of aggregation session they want to do on Friday.

As for my own ideas, “Too Many ESBs” turned in 152 views and 24 comments of it’s own. It broke down to most people agreeing with the premise and I think that ‘neilwd’ summarized the solution the best:

If we can start to build more standardized ways of engaging with technologies that fulfill common functions, that will really help companies find people from broader skill bases.

Along that line, I realized something. IBM has spent a considerable amount of time to embrace open standards on the transport level, data modeling level etc but we’ve never really seen any standard emerge on the user interface side other than the usability. Is that the result of a lack of focus, that the job is too hard to implement or what it would reduce branding opportunities amongst vendors?

Anyway I’m happy with the road this idea took during the Jam. It’s 2nd in most views and 2nd in most comments.

I’m also satisfied with my plight for an external community (8 comments, 72 views). I picked up a few email addresses of people who are also interested in the topic so I’ll try and see what I can do from that avenue. Again, unless theres some IBM buy-in though, it will be extremely difficult.

All-in-all, I feel like the Jam was just starting to gain momentum and was cut short but it remains to be seen when the doors will actually close.