Dr. Richard Mark Soley, executive director of the SOA Consortium - the world's largest consortium of its type - and chairman and chief executive officer of the Object Management Group, will be keynoting in New York City in June at SOAWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East. He will speak about 'Making the SOA Leap' - in other words, what's valuable about the move to SOA, how to both make the leap and make the leap valuable.

"SOA continues to be the hottest buzzword in 2008. But just what is it that’s valuable about the move to SOA? And how can your IT organization make the leap, and make the leap valuable to your business?" Soley will ask. 

In his keynote, he will show how the SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts. He will also share some of the experience gained from the SOA Consortium's Summit discussions with CIOs, CTOs and Chief Enterprise Architects who have results to share from refocusing their lines of business around recognizable, reusable and optimizable business processes

Soley is responsible for the vision and direction of the Consortium. He joined the nascent OMG as Technical Director in 1989, leading the development of its world-leading standardization process and the original CORBA specification.

In 1996, he led the effort to move into vertical market standards (starting with healthcare, finance, telecommunications and manufacturing) and modeling, leading first to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and later the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). He also led the effort to establish the SOA Consortium in January 2007.

Previously, Soley was a cofounder and former Chairman/CEO of A. I. Architects, Inc., maker of the 386 HummingBoard and other PC and workstation hardware and software. Prior to that, he consulted for various technology companies and venture firms on matters pertaining to software investment opportunities. Dr. Soley has also consulted for IBM, Motorola, PictureTel, Texas Instruments, Gold Hill Computer and others. He began his professional life at Honeywell Computer Systems working on the Multics operating system.

"OMG's SOA Consortium is making great strides in defining SOA to be a valuable business strategy for business agility, taking advantage of Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management and other concepts," said Soley, "and the OMG itself is making headway on modeling standards for services (as opposed to yet another set of standards for moving bits around wires."