BEinGRID mentioned at the Vortex 2008 conference

Vortex 2008 took place 24-26th of September 2008 at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. Vortex 2008 was an opportunity to thought-leaders, innovators and analysts from different parts of the industry to share their experiences and foresight on how companies can overcome business and technical challenges in order to exploit the benefits of XML, Web Services and SOA technologies.

Vortex 2008 speakers included chief architects from corporate users such as EBS and the Washington Mutual Bank, who talked about business challenges, business and IT analysts from Burton Group and CSC Covansys, who shared their views on the evolution of policy driven SOA solutions to meet such challenges, and innovators from vendors such as BT, CA, Dell, TIBCO and Vordel, who provided insights about forthcoming and future products that attempt to meet these challenges.
The event and keynote speeches attracted the attention of the media with press releases appearing as news items at CNBC, Reuters, Bloomberg, United Press International,  Business wire as well as specialised press such as "Euroinvestor" and "SOA and network architect&quot.
Distinguished keynote speakers at Vortex 2008 included:

• Mark O'Neill, CTO of Vordel presented five industry use cases of XML gateways in Telecoms, Government and Insurance.
• Tom Ray, SOA Security Architect at Washington Mutual Bank presented the top ten security lessons learned from implementation of SOA fo numerous internal/external services across their Credit Card, Commercial and Retail business units.
• Don Adams, the CTO of TIBCO who explained why an SOA cannot be deployed without usage monitoring, traffic control, and protection from attack and explained how in his view identity and security can be best applied to enhance SOA deployments.
• David Yeates, Senior IT Architecture Manager at EBS offered an end-user organization' perspective on what SOA Governance really means
• Sreedhar Kajeepeta, SVP and CTO of CSC Covansys Corporation of present the case for moving towards a policy-driven Service Oriented Infrastructure, after first explaining what policies are and how they are currently being used.
• Shashank Rajvanshi,Principal Product Manager from CA presented CA's reference security architecture for how to scale security management in the enterprise and concluded with recommendations, best practices, and use cases around SOA security management.
• Theo Dimitrakos, Head of Security Architectures at the Centre for Information and Security Systems Research, BT Group CTO, and Scientific Coordinator of the BEinGRID project, analysed research challenges and presented innovative future solutions for Security and Governance in Service Oriented Infrastructures.

The talk by Theo Dimitrakos highlighted the Security and Governance activities of BT’s Research Service Oriented Infrastructures programme and provided examples of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions that facilitate secure end-to-end service integration within enterprises and across business partners. This is achieved by securely virtualising enterprise applications and resources, by securing their exposure to customers and by enforcing content- and context-sensitive policies about service presentation, end-to-end transactions, federated identity, usage and access control, intelligent routing and QoS obligations.
Dr Theo Dimitrakos also gave examples of external collaborations where these concepts are being trialled, including the BEinGRID research and innovation initiative that has 96 partners across Europe and where BT coordinates research and innovation activities in 25 business pilots of Web Services and Grid technology in different business sectors.
Dr Theo Dimitrakos also took part in a panel where he joined other experts debating hot topics from SOA Governance, through Web 2.0, Web Oriented Architecture (WOA), ESBs, Policy Management, and the Web Services Open standards roadmap. More information about the event is available at http://www.vortex2008.com/