Interesting evening tonight – I went to listen to Andy Mulholland, CTO of Capgemini Group talk about service orientated architecture, defining what they are, what they do and why there is business value in it. It was hosted by the North London Branch of the British Computer Society – thanks to them for organising the event.

I spent the session comparing it to what I know about web based services, which is my area of interest, and how the open architectures he was advocating led to better value (and lower costs) both for the customer, the supplier – and moving further up the chain the supplier’s suppliers. The latter especially gaining from being able to access a greater number of customers whilst giving the middle man increased value. What is created is one big ecosystem which is scalable.

Whilst the talk about services was interesting, one thing in the Q&A session after intrigued me. It was the data. The piece that “feeds” the services is something that is yet to be standardised. The inefficiencies of centrally storing large amounts of data in xml type formats and other custom formats by Oracle are not perfected yet and is still being worked on. I will have to look into it further 🙂

One other item that arose was how someone connected to Microsoft came up with the name “Vista” – not that I have been able to confirm this anywhere on the web as yet – Windows Vista uses virtual folders and an integrated search functionalty to give you views through Windows. ie. a vista. 🙂 (Not as well written as in the presentation but I think the point is probably made).