Many past attendees have told us that they love the visionary insights Gartner provides, but they also wanted more hands-on, practical advice to complement the big picture. With that in mind, one of the new things we have introduced at the June Summits is a series of workshops that drill down into specific hot topics, given by analysts and some renowned guest speakers. We are really excited about these workshops - they are getting filled pretty quickly, so register now, seats are limited!

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One of the sessions that I am most looking forward to is Nick Carr's keynote entitled "The Big Switch: How the New Grid Will Transform IT?" Many of you probably first heard of Nick when you read his 2003 article "IT Doesn't Matter" in Harvard Business Review in which he set the stage for the critical debate about the strategic value of IT. He has since written a book on the subject, "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage" and has a blog of his own called Rough Type.

Nick has a new book entitled "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google," which he will be giving away and signing immediately after his keynote. Nick has generously provided a chapter online. The keynote will dive into the themes of this book, including the idea of more and more computing functions shifting from internal data centers to the Internet's vast computing grid. His recent post regarding Amazon's AWS reaching high "diversity" and "load" factors is an interesting case in point.

Daryl Plummer will moderate this keynote and is leading Gartner's efforts on the cloud computing aspects of this discussion. See his session at the EA Summit: "How Cloud Computing Will Change Your Future." Those of you attending AADI, make sure to check out the virtual track dedicated to this concept: SaaS & Cloud Computing.

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Many architects are willing and eager to share best practices and experiences. This makes the Analyst User Roundtables, which I covered in a previous post, particularly valuable at the EA Summit. As I mentioned, because of their limited size, many of these are likely to "sell out" early, so please sign up soon (follow the link and sign into Agenda Builder to register for your selected AURs!).

As in the AADI Summit, we will also be holding community roundtables, where users get to choose the topic and a user attendee co-leads the session. If you have a topic you would like to see covered in an end-user roundtable, or a roundtable you would like to lead, please send your suggestions to Pascal.Winckel@gartner.com.

The list of roundtables includes sessions on:
EA Leadership, Governance, Communication & Change Roundtables:
• Building and Managing a Successful Architecture Team – Richard Buchanan
• Defining effective EA standards – Bruce Robertson
• Best Practices in EA Governance – Scott Bittler
• How to Manage Architecture Change – Nick Gall
• Communicating Your EA Strategy: Do's and Don'ts – Scott Bittler

Connecting EA with Business, BPM & PPM Roundtables:
• Aligning Business & IT through Architecture: Lessons Learned – Anne Lapkin
• How to integrate IT portfolio Management in EA – Robert Handler
• Effectively Leveraging BPM in your EA – Janelle Hill & Betsy Burton

Defining Architecture Model Roundtables – Business, Information & Technical:• Business Architecture Models: What Works? What Doesn't? – Greta Weiss
• Creating and Managing an Effective Information Architecture – David Newman
• Best Practices in Defining a Technical Architecture – Bruce Robertson

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A few years ago, we tried a little innovation that has become one of my favorite things at our events – Analyst User Roundtables. The idea was simple (which is probably why it worked): create a session where end users interested in a subject and an analyst that covers the subject can sit down and have a group discussion. These have been really popular and are now a staple of our events.

This year we are adding another new twist – community roundtables – where users get to choose the topic and a user attendee co-leads the session. If you have a topic you would like to see covered in an end user roundtable, or you would like to lead a roundtable, please send your suggestions to Pascal.Winckel@gartner.com.

We have just released the list of AURs that will be held at the Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit (stay tuned for EA Summit roundtables). Because of the limited size, these often "sell out" very quickly, so I highly recommend you register early (follow the link and sign into Agenda Builder to register for your selected AURs!).

There will be six new analyst user roundtables at the AADI Summit in Orlando:
• Challenges & Lessons Learned Using Model-driven Development – Michael Blechar
• Choosing & Using Software-as-a-Service Solutions – Robert Desisto
• Best Practices in Data integration – Ted Friedman
• Best Practices for SOA, EDA and SaaS in B2B projects – Benoit Lheureux
• Next Practices: Developing & Running Applications In the Cloud – Yefim Natis
• Cloud Computing in the Real World – David Mitchell Smith

The remaining roundtables are the most popular ones from the last Summit. I have organized them into various topic areas for you.

Application Governance:
Managing the Application Portfolio and Lifecycle: What Works? – Jim Duggan
SOA Governance: Do's and Don'ts – Matt Hotle
Getting started with Lean and Agile Development – David Norton
Best Practices in Testing & Quality – Thomas Murphy

Open Source:
When and How to Adopt Open Source Software – Mark Driver

SOA, SODA, EDA:
Best Practices in Service-Oriented Development – Michael Blechar
SOA Governance: Do's and Don'ts – Matt Hotle
Leveraging BPM and SOA – Janelle Hill
Organizing for SOA: Roles and Responsibilities – Paolo Malinverno
Measuring the Value of SOA – Paolo Malinverno
Organizing for SOA: roles and responsibilities (repeat) – Daryl Plummer
Advanced Practices: Making the most of Event Processing and Event Driven Architecture – Roy Schulte
Best Practices in Applying SOA and Web standards: WS-*, REST – Dan Sholler
How to implement a SOA infrastructure: ESBs, appliances, flow managers etc. - Jess Thompson
Legacy modernization through SOA: What Works? What Doesn't? – Dale Vecchio

Web:
Early lessons on Enterprise Mashup Adoption – Anthony Bradley
Best Practices Adopting Web 2.0 Social Software Technologies in the Enterprise (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.) – Anthony Bradley
Implementing and Managing Portals: Do's and Don'ts – David Gootzit
AJAX and Rich Internet Applications: Do's and Don'ts – Ray Valdes

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Conference chairs play a critical role in shaping these events, so I think it's important that you get to know Anne Lapkin, Yefim Natis and David Newman. However, I think the best way to get to know them is to hear them in action, so here are a couple podcasts featuring two of the conference chairs:

• Anne Lapkin: What the EA Numbers Are Telling Us
• Yefim Natis: SOA Tips & Traps

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Hello, my name is Val Sribar, and I would like to welcome you to this blog, focused on two series of Gartner Events: the Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit and the Enterprise Architecture Summit.

Boy, the name of that first event series is a mouthful, isn't it? Well, I will start by admitting that we struggled to name that event series because we are in a world where everyone seems to have conflicting views on what all of this should be called. Let me offer two ways to gain clarity on this in a useful way:

1. Meet Pascal Winckel, our Event Program Manager, and see his take on what these events are all about.


2. Check out a few of our research notes that define these subjects and highlight the key issues our clients face in Application Architecture, Enterprise Architecture and Application Integration.

For those of you interested in learning a little more about me, I lead the Applications Research Group at Gartner. I was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My wife and I have three children under the age of five, who you can see using me as a jungle gym in my picture. When I'm not changing diapers or on the phone, I enjoy photography, skiing, and cooking.