With the introduction of Web Services over the last couple of years, there has been a renewed interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA). A SOA is an architecture that changes the software paradigm from "install and use" to "find and use" software. In this presentation, Mike presented the concepts behind SOA, the benefits of moving to an SOA and some of the potential pitfalls of using SOA in the enterprise.
 
Michael Stevens is an application architect with The Hartford specializing in service-oriented architectures for the enterprise. He has written several articles for developer.com and is co-author of therated book "Java Web Services Architecture". He has over fourteen years of experience in information technology architecting and developing software systems, most recently focusing on J2EE solutions. He is a certified Java programmer, a member of the IEEE Computer Society, and of the ACM. He may be reached at mike@mestevens.com.

The above two books as door prizes courtesy Addison Wesley.  Plus two copies of Java Web Services Architecture as door prizes courtesy Morgan Kaufmann.