We are pleased to confirm that the next meeting of the WebSphere User Group (UK) will take place on Wednesday 25th October 2017, to be held in the Royal Society in Edinburgh. There will be no charge for this meeting and as usual we aim to have an excellent agenda lined up, covering a range of current and emerging application, integration and cloud technologies.
Registration:
Please register here
Provisional Agenda
Registration and Coffee begins from 8:30am, with the Chairman's Intro at 9:00am. The first session begins at 9:30am.
A buffet Lunch is served at 12:30pm, with coffee breaks included in the morning and afternoon.
App Server and Microservices
09:30 - 10:15
Title:
WebSphere Application Server Technical Update
Abstract:
Over the last year IBM has delivered Microprofile support in WebSphere Liberty - a new programming model for developing microservices. We also released IBM Voice Gateway - a WebSphere based solution that connects Watson services in the cloud to call centers, allowing Watson to act as a cognitive call center agent, and Microservice Builder - making it easy to develop, deploy, and manage microservices in the IBM Cloud. Finally we have recently launched Open Liberty - an open source lightweight application server ideal for developing microservices. Come to this session to learn about the latest updates and direction for WebSphere.
Speakers:
Thomas Banks
Thomas Banks is a senior offering manager for WebSphere Application Server and the IBM Voice Gateway. Tom has over 7 years experience working in the WebSphere Application Server team, and specializes on the WebSphere in Docker strategy as well as Voice Gateway.
10:45 - 11:30
Title:
'no charts, all demo' introduction to Docker
Abstract:
This session will start with the basics of running a Docker container and what is happening under the covers. We'll then move on to Docker Swarm and the basics of container orchestration. We'll use WebSphere Application Server as the basis for our examples but the focus will be on the container technologies themselves. As the title says, don't expect any charts - this will all be live demo.
Speakers:
Mark Nuttall
Dr Mark Nuttall is a software engineer in the WebSphere development team. He's currently working on Microservice Builder with a focus on DevOps, workflow automation, Kubernetes, Helm, and related technologies and practices.
11:40 - 12:25
Title:
Kubernetes for Beginners: overview, key concepts and lots of demos
Abstract:
Kubernetes is an increasingly popular tool for 'container orchestration' - managing collections of Docker containers. Following on from the 'No charts, all demo' introduction to Docker, we'll cover the basics of Kubernetes: what it does, how it's organised, how to make it work for you. We'll touch on Helm, Ingress, external storage, and then hand over to Kevin Postreich for a demonstration.
Speakers:
Kevin Postreich
Kevin is the IBM World Wide technical sales lead for WebSphere Application Server, supporting customer deployments of WebSphere Application Server and Liberty, WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WAS on Cloud solutions. His role and responsibility also includes development and delivery of technical accelerators for IBM technical sales organizations, customers, and business partners around the world. He routinely leads customer workshops and delivers technical enablement designed to accelerate the experience, knowledge, and adoption of IBM Hybrid Cloud and Systems Middleware solutions. Kevin is a regular speaker at IBM events such as WebSphere User Groups, Software Technical Academies, and InterConnect. He has experience with WebSphere in context of IBM Bluemix, DevOps, UrbanCode Deploy, Docker, micro services, APIs, WebSphere Connect, IBM PureApplication System, eXtreme Scale and more.
Mark Nuttall
Dr Mark Nuttall is a software engineer in the WebSphere development team. He's currently working on Microservice Builder with a focus on DevOps, workflow automation, Kubernetes, Helm, and related technologies and practices.
13:30 - 14:15
Title:
Microservice Builder: what's new
Abstract:
Microservice Builder has been in active development since its release earlier this year. It's a set of technologies that make it easy to build, deploy, run and manage microservices, hybrid and containerized applications. This talk will summarise the improvements we've made over the summer before handing over to Kevin Postreich for a demonstration.
Speakers:
Kevin Postreich
Kevin is the IBM World Wide technical sales lead for WebSphere Application Server, supporting customer deployments of WebSphere Application Server and Liberty, WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WAS on Cloud solutions. His role and responsibility also includes development and delivery of technical accelerators for IBM technical sales organizations, customers, and business partners around the world. He routinely leads customer workshops and delivers technical enablement designed to accelerate the experience, knowledge, and adoption of IBM Hybrid Cloud and Systems Middleware solutions. Kevin is a regular speaker at IBM events such as WebSphere User Groups, Software Technical Academies, and InterConnect. He has experience with WebSphere in context of IBM Bluemix, DevOps, UrbanCode Deploy, Docker, micro services, APIs, WebSphere Connect, IBM PureApplication System, eXtreme Scale and more.
Mark Nuttall
Dr Mark Nuttall is a software engineer in the WebSphere development team. He's currently working on Microservice Builder with a focus on DevOps, workflow automation, Kubernetes, Helm, and related technologies and practices.
14:25 - 15:10
Abstract:
Learn about Open Liberty - an open source, lightweight application server ideal for developing and deploying microservices. This application server is built from the core capabilities of WebSphere Liberty and sits as the foundation to the WebSphere Application Server family.
Speakers:
Thomas Banks
Thomas Banks is a senior offering manager for WebSphere Application Server and the IBM Voice Gateway. Tom has over 7 years experience working in the WebSphere Application Server team, and specializes on the WebSphere in Docker strategy as well as Voice Gateway.
15:30 - 16:15
Title:
Microservices Architecture: Where Do ESBs, Messaging and APIs Fit?
Abstract:
This session explores the myths and realities of microservices in relation to integration architecture. Microservices are as much a new approach to application architecture as they are a return to well-known good practices of isolation and decoupling. The complexities are all the more apparent when comparisons are drawn with evolved integration architecture concepts. The "ESB" concept is often derided in microservices architecture. Is the pattern completely invalid or does it still have its place? Messaging is the silent but essential partner that is key to decoupling among microservice components. But what type of messaging should you use where? Where do APIs fit into the picture? What different categories of API are present?
Speakers:
Kim Clark
Kim has spent the last couple of decades working in the field helping customers implement the integration aspects of solutions tackling concepts such as SOA, BPM and APIs and microservices. He has a broad and deep knowledge of the architecture and design issues involved and of the related IBM products. As a result, he writes and presents regularly on design and architecture best practices in this space. In his current role he works as a strategist on IBM's integration portfolio shaping the future direction of the products, but he still spends much of his time assisting customers maturing their integration architecture. Recent articles include "The evolving hybrid integration reference architecture" https://ibm.biz/HybridIntRefArch and "Microservices, SOA, and APIs: Friends or enemies?" https://ibm.biz/MicroservicesVsSoa.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimjulianclark
16:25 - 17:10
(empty slot)
Cloud Platforms and Process
09:30 - 10:15
Title:
What's new in IBM's Digital Process Automation
Abstract:
In this session, you will learn about the new capabilities that we introduced in IBM BPM over recent months, including the latest release of IBM BPM v8.6. Learn about new web-based Process Designer capabilities including REST integration and advanced integration services, governance controls, the new IBM UI toolkit to build compelling business user experience.
Speakers:
Claudio Tagliabue
Claudio Tag is an IBM Cloud Solution Architect, with vast experience in Digital Transformation and the world of XaaS. He is excited by business change in the 21st Century and the consequent demands on technology. Making the "complicated" "business as usual" has been Tag’s focus for the past 10 years. Through his work with clients as a domain expert for IBM's ground-breaking cloud technologies, Tag has gained significant insight into today's senior IT stakeholder motivations. Tag worked in various IBM labs, and presented his work at several conferences around the world, focusing on BPM, RPA, microservices, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and Docker.
Tag also authored two IBM Redbook publications. He can be followed on Twitter @ClaudioTag
Sam Weeks
Sam Weeks is a technical specialist for IBM Cloud, specializing in Digital Process Automation. He is passionate about driving value from process optimization in modern business. Working with several customers in different industries, Sam has matured first-hand experience with Cognitive and IoT capabilities, used to extend IBM SaaS, ODM and BPM technologies, and his work has been shared across Europe. Sam is constantly working to push the traditional boundaries of BPM. His work with APIs for process optimization is industry leading in the financial sector, bringing UK banks into the API-economy to create compelling customer experiences.
10:45 - 11:30
Title:
IBM Robotic Process Automation
Abstract:
With the recent surge of interest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), clients around the world are looking to position software robots alongside orchestrated business processes and traditional integrations in their application architecture landscape. This session addresses how RPA relates to Business Process Management, and introduces the new member of the IBM Digital Process Automation family: IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere.
We will show how BPM and RPA can be combined from both a conceptual and a technical point of view and we will bring to life the power of Cognitive Business Operations when applied to RPA.
The session provides guidance and clarity to address the confusion between RPA and BPM and answer key questions such as how the drivers for RPA and BPM compare what the joint value proposition is and how this works in practice.
Speakers:
Claudio Tagliabue
Claudio Tag is an IBM Cloud Solution Architect, with vast experience in Digital Transformation and the world of XaaS. He is excited by business change in the 21st Century and the consequent demands on technology. Making the "complicated" "business as usual" has been Tag’s focus for the past 10 years. Through his work with clients as a domain expert for IBM's ground-breaking cloud technologies, Tag has gained significant insight into today's senior IT stakeholder motivations. Tag worked in various IBM labs, and presented his work at several conferences around the world, focusing on BPM, RPA, microservices, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and Docker.
Tag also authored two IBM Redbook publications. He can be followed on Twitter @ClaudioTag
Sam Weeks
Sam Weeks is a technical specialist for IBM Cloud, specializing in Digital Process Automation. He is passionate about driving value from process optimization in modern business. Working with several customers in different industries, Sam has matured first-hand experience with Cognitive and IoT capabilities, used to extend IBM SaaS, ODM and BPM technologies, and his work has been shared across Europe. Sam is constantly working to push the traditional boundaries of BPM. His work with APIs for process optimization is industry leading in the financial sector, bringing UK banks into the API-economy to create compelling customer experiences.
11:40 - 12:25
Title:
Virtual Agents: Myth-busting the Cognitive chatbot.
Abstract:
Join Stephen Woolman as he explains the concepts behind natural language chatbots, how they have been built and where they have been deployed in the marketplace. Stephen will be explaining what circumstances chatbots can work for in your organisation as well as highlighting areas where humans still rule the agent industry. Not stopping there, there is even a live demo taking place that shows how Watson Conversation makes chatbots easy to build and deploy and how IBM Voice Gateway is changing the virtual agent market again by providing full access to telephony.
Speakers:
Stephen Woolman
Stephen Woolman is a technical specalist in Bluemix and Watson AI. He has extensive experience building and deploying a wide range of Cognitive solutions on the IBM Bluemix Cloud platform for IBM clients, taking advantage of the many capabilities that Watson offers the marketplace. He has a wide range of experience with complex deployment and development architectures that are common in enterprise organisations which provides a great knowledge and insight into which ideas can go on to become game changers for his clients.
13:30 - 14:15
Title:
Bluemix Platform: Accelerating Innovation
Abstract:
Join Stephen Woolman as he introduces the Bluemix Platform capabilities and use cases. You will be taken through what our clients have used the platform for and how you can best make use of the platform to introduce IBMs innovative capabilities and services into your own organisation.
Speakers:
Stephen Woolman
Stephen Woolman is a technical specalist in Bluemix and Watson AI. He has extensive experience building and deploying a wide range of Cognitive solutions on the IBM Bluemix Cloud platform for IBM clients, taking advantage of the many capabilities that Watson offers the marketplace. He has a wide range of experience with complex deployment and development architectures that are common in enterprise organisations which provides a great knowledge and insight into which ideas can go on to become game changers for his clients.
14:25 - 15:10
Title:
More than a private cloud: IBM Cloud private
Abstract:
Organisations are looking to reinvent themselves to stay competitive in the digital revolution happening now. Moving to the Cloud is an imperative, but so is choice.
Multi-cloud strategies are a de-facto standard, and this has ripple effects on the investment and approach needed to move critical complex workloads towards the cloud - be that Public, Private or both.
IBM can offer choice: the recently announced IBM Cloud private addresses the needs of those clients for whom workload complexity, data sensitivity, regulatory or compliance demands require the benefits of a private Ccoud environment.
Bringing together the power of Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and enterprise-class IBM Middleware, IBM Cloud private is the cornerstone of any multi-cloud strategy.
Speakers:
Claudio Tagliabue
Claudio Tag is an IBM Cloud Solution Architect, with vast experience in Digital Transformation and the world of XaaS. He is excited by business change in the 21st Century and the consequent demands on technology. Making the "complicated" "business as usual" has been Tag’s focus for the past 10 years. Through his work with clients as a domain expert for IBM's ground-breaking cloud technologies, Tag has gained significant insight into today's senior IT stakeholder motivations. Tag worked in various IBM labs, and presented his work at several conferences around the world, focusing on BPM, RPA, microservices, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes and Docker.
Tag also authored two IBM Redbook publications. He can be followed on Twitter @ClaudioTag
15:30 - 16:15
Abstract:
Learn about the IBM Voice Gateway - a WebSphere based offering which is bringing Watson's cloud services to call centers, allowing Watson to talk to callers and act as a virtual agent, as well as listening into calls between live agents and a caller to provide useful information to the live agents in real-time, saving time and aiding the agents in resolving calls quickly and easily.
Speakers:
Kevin Postreich
Kevin is the IBM World Wide technical sales lead for WebSphere Application Server, supporting customer deployments of WebSphere Application Server and Liberty, WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WAS on Cloud solutions. His role and responsibility also includes development and delivery of technical accelerators for IBM technical sales organizations, customers, and business partners around the world. He routinely leads customer workshops and delivers technical enablement designed to accelerate the experience, knowledge, and adoption of IBM Hybrid Cloud and Systems Middleware solutions. Kevin is a regular speaker at IBM events such as WebSphere User Groups, Software Technical Academies, and InterConnect. He has experience with WebSphere in context of IBM Bluemix, DevOps, UrbanCode Deploy, Docker, micro services, APIs, WebSphere Connect, IBM PureApplication System, eXtreme Scale and more.
Thomas Banks
Thomas Banks is a senior offering manager for WebSphere Application Server and the IBM Voice Gateway. Tom has over 7 years experience working in the WebSphere Application Server team, and specializes on the WebSphere in Docker strategy as well as Voice Gateway.
16:25 - 17:10
(empty slot)
Integration and Messaging
09:30 - 10:15
Title:
Hybrid Integration Futures: Convergence
Abstract:
In the last few years, there has been an expansion in the number of integration users outside of the central IT department; citizen integrators, shadow integrators, and API developers all require integration capabilities to achieve business objectives. A major part of our strategy as we move towards the close of 2017 and into 2018 is to join up the power of IBM Integration Bus and IBM App Connect Professional to enable integration users across an enterprise create, deploy, monitor, and manage integrations using tools that are relevant to their skills and the use cases they have, all in a single cloud service. During this session you will hear an overview of the IBM Hybrid Integration convergence strategy and understand how you can empower the broader organization across IT and LOB with integration tooling to solve a variety or new challenges.
Speakers:
Amy McCormick
Amy McCormick is Offering Manager for IBM Integration Bus. She has many years experience in the Integration space managing the life cycle of various Integration Offerings from IBM and is responsible for identifying needs in the market, presenting innovative and creative product solutions, managing new product development and launches, monitoring the performance of existing products and services, and raising the awareness of the value of IBM offerings to customers.
10:45 - 11:30
Title:
IBM Integration Bus Update
Abstract:
IBM Integration Bus is IBM's strategic integration technology for enterprise integration use cases and has been updated with lots of new function over the last 2 years to deliver greater business value, enabling users to take advantage of new business opportunities. In this session we will look at:
An overview of what's new in IBM Integration Bus
The differences, benefits, and how to get started with the deployment options for IBM Integration Bus
The role of microservices in your integration landscape and where ESB architectures should be modernized
Imperatives of ‘lightweight integration’ and how your organization can adopt agile development practices within your integration imperatives
Speakers:
Amy McCormick
Amy McCormick is Offering Manager for IBM Integration Bus. She has many years experience in the Integration space managing the life cycle of various Integration Offerings from IBM and is responsible for identifying needs in the market, presenting innovative and creative product solutions, managing new product development and launches, monitoring the performance of existing products and services, and raising the awareness of the value of IBM offerings to customers.
11:40 - 12:25
Title:
Whats New in IBM MQ?
Abstract:
It will soon be eighteen months since IBM MQ started its Continuous Delivery/Long Term Support delivery model and in that time we've delivered a lot. This session will touch on the features we've delivered and the general themes and direction we've been following and going forward. Showing you the benefits whether you're maintaining an existing MQ environment or embracing the Cloud and new practices and building new systems.
Speakers:
John Cooper
John is a senior member of the IBM MQ development team specialising in Test & Operations for both distributed and cloud platforms. He has over ten years of experience with MQ, making significant contributions to MQ's Continuous Delivery methodology. He is primarily responsible for maintaining code quality and improving efficiency through test best practices, operational enhancements and process transformation across MQ's current, and future, releases.
13:30 - 14:15
Title:
IBM Message Hub: Cloud-native Messaging
Abstract:
IBM Message Hub is a new Bluemix service for messaging in the cloud. It's ideal for aggregating streams of event data from many sources. It's great for feeding data at speed into other services such as analytics. You can also use it to bridge securely from your enterprise MQ systems into the cloud. Come and hear about this exciting new offering from IBM's messaging team.
Speakers:
Adrian Preston
Adrian Preston is a senior engineer at IBM. He has worked for 15+ years on a variety of messaging technologies including JMS implementations and IBM MQ. He is currently responsible for components of IBM Message Hub, which is a cloud-based messaging service built on Apache Kafka.
14:25 - 15:10
Title:
What's new in IBM APIConnect
Abstract:
It’s been a very exciting year for the IBM API Connect offerings. This presentation covers recent updates, as well as exciting new announcements. Come hear about the new features and functions available in IBM API Connect, and how they enable you to secure, control, manage, socialize and accelerate the delivery of API, microservices, mobile, web, cloud and serverless workloads, while allowing deployment form-factor flexibility.
Speakers:
Carlo Marcoli
Carlo Marcoli is an Solution Architect specialised in API and Digital Channels. He has a long experience helping customers adopting leading edge technology solutions to transform their business. He currently works in the world-wide APIConnect pre-sales team, with a particular focus on Open Banking and API Economy initiatives
15:30 - 16:15
Title:
App Connect Professional Update
16:25 - 17:10
(empty slot)
DevOps and Monitoring
09:30 - 10:15
Title:
Optimizing Digital Transaction Performance
Abstract:
Digital transactions are the information exchanges underlying all of today’s enterprise business services. The overall reliability and performance of those transactions is a critical issue facing IT groups and the business units they support. Yet, most IT organizations still struggle to manage this all-important aspect of operations. See this presentation to get key insights on how to gain valuable insights about business transactions that leverage middleware technologies such as IBM WebSphere, IBM MQ, IBM Integration Bus and DataPower.
Discover:
· Why digital transactions are center stage in optimizing business outcomes, including business performance, consumer priorities, security, and compliance
- What happens to businesses when transaction performance stumbles
- What the technical challenges are in providing a unified set of insights for operations, development, and business stakeholders
- Key process requirements for optimizing digital transaction performance across an IT environment and ownership requirements between IT and business stakeholders
- A short recipe for success in optimizing digital transaction performance, impact, and measurable value
Speakers:
Scott Corrigan
As Vice President of Technology Services, Scott Corrigan manages Nastel’s technology related activities in the field, including sales engineering and services delivery. In his role, Scott leads a worldwide team that supports customers, sales and partners. With over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, Scott has architected software solutions and managed deployments to enable a large number of corporate customers to succeed in their business objectives. Scott’s extensive track record in Enterprise Software in the United States and Europe empowers him to understand the technology challenges faced by global organizations. Prior to joining Nastel, Scott was with CA Technologies, Inc., where he held technical leadership roles in IT infrastructure and application management business units.
10:45 - 11:30
Title:
Application Performance Management (APM) for a Hybrid World
Abstract:
Application performance management (APM) is the practice of detecting and addressing software application issues, so that end users have a quality experience. As applications and platforms have deepened in complexity, the need for APM solutions has become more crucial. Angus Jamieson will give insight to, as well as a demo, IBM's APM solution.
Speakers:
Angus Jamieson
Angus has over 30 years experience in the IT Service Management arena helping large and small clients gain value form IBM's solutions. As a speciality architect in the Hybrid Cloud division he is responsible for the entire ITSM solution set and works with major banks, Scottish customers as well as others in the UK. He drives the UK Tivoli User Group (Nov 30th@ SBank!) which sees all our major customers come together to share and exchange ideas.
11:40 - 12:25
(empty slot)
13:30 - 14:15
Title:
Cloud & DevOps Networking Event - How to Rapidly deliver your Applications
Abstract:
Companies are aggressively working to transform and embrace new technologies enabling them to rapidly deliver software innovation to their end users.
Teams often struggle getting started with the three key components of a DevOps approach: people, process, and tools.
This session will enable you to understand how to scale DevOps in your organization and employ hybrid cloud technologies to achieve business success
Agenda:
- DevOps Introduction
- The Business Value of DevOps
- DevOps Customer Case Study
- Accelerating your DevOps journey
- Continuous Testing & Deployment Demo
14:25 - 15:10
Title:
Cloud & DevOps Networking Event - How to Rapidly deliver your Applications
Abstract:
Companies are aggressively working to transform and embrace new technologies enabling them to rapidly deliver software innovation to their end users.
Teams often struggle getting started with the three key components of a DevOps approach: people, process, and tools.
This session will enable you to understand how to scale DevOps in your organization and employ hybrid cloud technologies to achieve business success
Agenda:
- DevOps Introduction
- The Business Value of DevOps
- DevOps Customer Case Study
- Accelerating your DevOps journey
- Continuous Testing & Deployment Demo
15:30 - 16:15
Title:
Cloud & DevOps Networking Event - How to Rapidly deliver your Applications
Abstract:
Companies are aggressively working to transform and embrace new technologies enabling them to rapidly deliver software innovation to their end users.
Teams often struggle getting started with the three key components of a DevOps approach: people, process, and tools.
This session will enable you to understand how to scale DevOps in your organization and employ hybrid cloud technologies to achieve business success
Agenda:
- DevOps Introduction
- The Business Value of DevOps
- DevOps Customer Case Study
- Accelerating your DevOps journey
- Continuous Testing & Deployment Demo
16:25 - 17:10
(empty slot)
Vendor Stands
To enquire about a vendor stand please use our Contact Form
Location: ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH - Edinburgh
Address
ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH - Edinburgh
22-26 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 2PQ.
Tel: (0)131 240 5000
Car Parking
If you are arriving by car please note that parking near The Royal Society is limited to meter parking only which can prove costly. The nearest car parks are at the St James centre; Leith Street or Castle Terrace, where there are 24 hour car parks. Please allow 10-15 minutes after parking to get to the venue.
By Road
Main roads into Edinburgh are the M8 from the West and the A1 from the South. From the East please follow the A90 and head for Queensferry Road
By Rail
Waverley Station is a five minute walk from the Royal Society with frequent local and national services. For Further information on train services please contact National Rail Enquiries on 08457484950
By Air
Edinburgh airport is approximately 12 kilometres from the city centre and is well served by frequent bus services and airport taxis. Car hire is available at the airport . The airport is a 20-30 minute car drive from the city centre.
Note, return flights from London are currently avaliable from budget carriers such easyJet for approx £50.
By Bus
Bus services to and from Edinburgh arrive/depart from St Andrew Square which is a five minute walk away.
By Bicycle
Main roads into Edinburgh are the M8 from the West and the A1 from the South. Cycle paths exist within Edinburgh. If you wish to come by bicycle please advise so that bike storage facilities can be arranged.
