In this session at SOA World Conference and Expo 2008 West, Rob Steward described how data services are critical to the predominant and emerging architectures we're embracing for building new systems. SOA is becoming a standard enterprise architecture and WOA is enabling organizations to pull together data from multiple sources and services. Cloud computing is an architecture that provides high-performance computing, massive data storage and scalability at commodity pricing.

With all modern computing architectures, the need for robust technologies for data access and data integration has become more critical then ever before. Due to the vital role that data plays both in business and systems operations, database architectures, information specialists, data integration experts, and anyone responsible for data persistence in an organization are increasingly being called upon to contribute to their organization's SOA and other computing initiatives - whether or not this was intended at the onset.

This presentation reviewed the technologies, best practices, and patterns that have shaped the way we utilize enterprise data for SOA, WOA and cloud computing.

View Rob Steward's Session here

As vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies, Rob Steward is responsible for the development, strategy and oversight of the company's data connectivity products including the Shadow mainframe integration suite client software and the industry-leading Connect family of database drivers and data providers. Additional product development responsibilities include DataDirect Sequelink, and DataDirect XQuery, as well as the management of DataDirect's Custom Engineering Development group.