Ahmed Shehada
IBM, UAE
Title of talk: Service Oriented Architecture: Technical Foundation, Governance and Openness
Summary of talk: As today's marketplace globalizes, new markets, new workforces and new competitors drive companies to look for new ways to adapt to change more quickly. In the past, organizations might have needed to make significant changes on a yearly basis. Now, market forces require businesses to make these same levels of changes on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that offers business agility, speed to market, improved profitability and reduced costs. An SOA is also widely recognized as an enabler of innovation and new business operating models using is an integrated, open-standards-based set of software, best practices and patterns.
However, in order to realize these benefits, organizations are finding it takes more than developing the technology infrastructure, processes and tools. SOA enablement is a major transformation for many organizations, requiring effective governance and organizational change. SOA governance is the mechanism to ensure that the decision making structure is solid, relationships between services and parties are managed and that there is compliance with the laws, policies, standards and procedures under which an organization operates.
Biography: Ahmed is a Business Integration Consultant at IBM, responsible for IBM's Business Integration and Middleware technologies for the Middle East region. He is part of the IBM Software Group in charge of propagating, driving and deploying IBM's middleware and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) strategy and market leadership in the region.
Prior to his time at IBM, Mr. Shehada worked at Celestica Inc, a leading EMS (Electronics Manufacturer Services) provider, as a software engineer, delivering key supply chain and shop floor production processes, automating manufacturing systems processes such as forecasting, demand planning and inventory management, resulting in reduction of manufacturing cycle time and inventory costs. He also served as a member of standards committees representing Celestica in various industry standards forums and initiatives participated in NEMI, PDX and RosettaNet consortiums whose mission is to set standards for of the North American electronics manufacturing supply chain.
He currently serves as Chairman of the Canadian Business Council of Dubai and Northern Emirates, an organization representing 130 Canadian companies operating in the United Arab Emirates. Ahmed is a regular guest speaker at S.P.Jain Center of Management (Dubai Campus). Topics included, Service Oriented Architecture and IBM Integration and Middleware technologies & strategies.
He holds a bachelor of Computer Engineering from McGill University, Montreal, Canada.