Data services, contends Rob Steward, Vice President of Research and Development at DataDirect Technologies, are critical to the predominant and emerging architectures we're embracing for building new systems. "Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a standard enterprise architecture and Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) is enabling organizations to pull together data from multiple sources and services," notes Steward, who will be presenting at DataServices World 2008 West in the Keynote Hall at The Fairmont Hotel on November 20, 2008.

"Cloud computing is an architecture that provides high-performance computing, massive data storage and scalability at commodity pricing," he adds.

In his presentation, "SOA, WOA and Cloud Computing: The New Frontier for Data Services," Steward will review the technologies, best practices, and patterns that are shaping the way we utilize enterprise data for SOA, WOA and cloud computing.

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.

Data Services World is about the confluence of databases, data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise computing, Internet computing, grids and cloud computing. Its focus is architectures and technologies for accessing data from heterogenous data sources and providing that data to consumers such as components, services and applications.

DataServices World 2008 West, being held November 20 in San Jose, California, at the 14th International SOA World Conference & Expo, has a lineup of speakers headlined by Dr Mike Carey (pictured), one of the 50 Most Influential Computer Scientists in the world. The lineup also includes experts from Adobe, Salesforce, Yahoo!, IBM, m2mi, and DataDirect Technologies.

"DataServices World is about the confluence of databases, data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise computing and Internet computing," says Ken North, DataServicesWorld 2008 West Conference Chair.

Carey, who leads the lineup at The Fairmont Hotel, is Bren Professor of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine and the 2005 recipient of the ACM IGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award - the computing equivalent of an Academy Award!

Carey, a National Academy of Engineering member, is acknowledged as one of the 50 most influential computer scientists in the world by a UCLA-maintained Web site that tracks research citations. He is best known for his work on advanced database systems and database system performance.

His most influential academic projects have been the EXODUS and SHORE database systems, which continue to influence designers and researchers in the field. In industry, he contributed to IBM’s DB2 Universal Database system and played a leadership role for BEA Systems’ data integration and management solutions. These systems are widely used in the banking, insurance and healthcare industries, and they also have many government applications.

Speaking of the much-acclaimed DataServices World event, which kicked off in March of this year in New York City, Ken North said of Data Services as a technology approach: "Its focus is architectures and technologies for accessing data from heterogenous data sources and providing that data to consumers such as components, services and applications."

North continued:

"Many organizations have a variety of persistent data stores, including SQL databases, geo-coded data files, spreadsheets, content management systems and XML. Services, applications, and mashups can consume and integrate data from disparate data sources. In an n-tier enterprise architecture and a service-oriented architecture, the logic for providing data from databases and other data sources resides in data access layers and data services layer."

DataServices World 2008 West - being held at SOA World 2008 West - is a one-day event being held November 20 in The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA. Sessions include:

Ken North - DataServices World Chair, KNComputing, LLC Information Retrieval, Data Sharing and Cheap Computing: Hindsight and Foresigh	Susan Malaika - Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Universal Services for SOA, WOA, Cloud and XML Data
Parand Darugar - Director of Software Architecture, Yahoo! Data Processing in the Cloud	Peter Coffee - Director of Platform Research, SalesForce.com Workshop: Data Quality, Data Access and Data Services
Jeff Vroom - Principal Scientist, Adobe LiveCycle Data Services: Declarative Data Management	Rob Steward - VP of Research and Development, DataDirect Technologies SOA, WOA and Cloud Computing: The New Frontier for Data Services
Dr Michael Carey - Professor, University of California at Irvine Services Modeling: Data Modeling in the SOA Age	Geoff Brown - Founder & CEO, m2mi Corporation Modeling & Machine Intelligence

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