ABOUT THE SPEAKER David Chappell has over 20 years of experience in the software industry covering a broad range of roles including R&D, code-slinger, sales, support, and marketing. As director of engineering for Sonic Software, Chappell led the development effort for SonicMQ, the industry’s most scalable message server. He also has extensive experience in distributed computing, including enterprise service buses (ESBs), message-oriented middleware, CORBA, COM, and Web application server infrastructure. Most recently Chappell authored the first and definitive book on the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) published by O’Reilly Media. Chappell is also coauthor of Java Web Services (O’Reilly, 2002), Professional ebXML Foundations (Wrox, 2001), and The Java Message Service (O’Reilly, 2000). In addition, he has published numerous articles in leading industry publications, such as Java Developer’s Journal, Web Services Journal, XML-Journal, and Network World. SESSION DESCRIPTION Service-oriented architecture (SOA) represents the opportunity to achieve broad-scale interoperability, while providing the flexibility required to continually adapt technology to business requirements. No small feat, particularly when one considers the extent and complexity of today's IT environments. As both a technology concept and IT discipline, the challenge inherent in SOAs is maintaining the right architectural approach. If all services in an SOA are treated as interdependent point-to-point interfaces, then the complexity of implementing and maintaining them in this spaghetti-like architecture becomes enormous. The enterprise service bus (ESB) has emerged as one of the first true SOA product offerings, bringing SOA from pattern to production. ESBs provide a framework for building and deploying an event-driven, enterprise SOA and accommodate the configuration, hosting, and management of integration components as services across the business.