This is a big year for WebSphere Application Server (WAS) as we deliver full support for Java EE 7 and Java SE 8 along with other innovative application technologies - at the same time providing the WAS platform in an increasing number of cloud environments and with a choice of new business models. Portability across a variety of cloud platforms demands an open approach to container provisioning and management, along with an application experience that can easily expose and consume cloud services. I'll talk about all the latest WAS announcements and discuss the strategic direction of WAS, including the evolution of portable, open and composable dockerized application patterns and our progress on putting WebSphere Liberty at the heart of every cloud.

Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Architect of the WebSphere Application Server, based at the IBM Hursley Software Lab in the UK. Ian has over 20 years' experience working in distributed enterprise middleware across product development, open standards and open source. He is responsible for the strategy and development of IBM's WebSphere Application Server, including the lightweight WAS Liberty Profile, and the tools that support it.

This session aims to show Fidelity’s journey to using lightweight containers and how automation & self-service now drives wider adoption of the Liberty profile.

Lee FitzHenry

Lee has worked for a number of Financial services organisations over his time in various teams, he started with WebSphere 3.0.2 on Windows NT right up to the latest 8.5, he has worked in development, support, engineering and more recently moved into a managerial role heading up the Global Middleware group at Fidelity Investments.

Containers promise to provide the ability to take a lightweight image from development and deploy it at high density in production. In this session, you'll see how the combination of WebSphere Application Server Liberty and Docker can deliver on that promise. After an overview of containerization and Docker, the session will demonstrate how quickly you can get an application up-and-running with a WebSphere Application Server image, and how a continuous delivery pipeline could be used to take that image through to production - whether on-premise or in the cloud - without the pain of pushing around multi-gigabyte virtual images and without the danger of any more "it works for me" moments. You'll also learn about plans for supporting the management of Docker containers in Liberty collectives.

David Currie

David is the Docker Architect for WebSphere Application Server. He worked on V3.5 of the application server but has worked on a number of other products and in software services in the interim. David has a keen interest in software craftmanship and all things agile.

Continuous delivery—delivering frequent, small, well tested changes to enterprise applications and infrastructure—is a characteristic of innovative businesses that are responsive to customer requirements. DevOps tools like Chef, Puppet and IBM UrbanCode Deploy fulfill this goal. Chef and Puppet simplify the configuration of operating systems and middleware. You write code to represent your infrastructure and manage it in source control, just like application code. Used together with IBM UrbanCode Deploy, application updates and changes to database schema and other aspects of an IT infrastructure can be co-ordinated and monitored. Come learn some of the basics and see a change move through the continuous delivery pipeline into production.

Jeremy Hughes

Jeremy Hughes is the WebSphere Application Server development architect for DevOps and Open Source, based at IBM's Hursley development laboratory in the UK, recently focusing on enabling the Liberty Profile to be managed by popular DevOps frameworks, including Chef. He is an IBM Lab Advocate, helping customers make the most effective use of WebSphere products. He has led technology development in OSGi Applications and Web Services delivering to many WebSphere Application Server releases. He is a committer and PMC lead on the Apache Aries project. He is passionate about building a wider ecosystem of technology, often Open Source, around IBM products to help customers build their solutions

-deals with the hot issue of Security and Data Protection (sometimes called ""Privacy"") for cloud services
- touches on the issues which arise when customers place data and applications into cloud services and
how this differs from traditional on-premises installations
- factors to consider when choosing cloud services
- handling deployment of applications & data into cloud services
- the place of standards & certifications for Security & Data Protection for cloud services - ISO 27017 & ISO 27018"

Mike Edwards

Mike Edwards works at IBM's Hursley Park labs in the UK and his focus is cloud computing - in particular cloud computing standards, security and privacy in cloud computing and the Bluemix PaaS environment.

Mike is chair of the UK IST38 cloud computing standards committee at BSI and UK head of delegation to the ISO/IEC SC 38 cloud computing standards committee.
He is also a member of the ISO SC27 security standards committee and the JTC/1 WG10 committee on IoT standards. He is editor of the 19086 Part 1 standard on Cloud SLAs.

Mike works with customers who are looking to develop applications in a cloud computing environment, especially mobile and web applications.
He helps customers to understand the productivity gains for both developers and operations staff which are possible with a Platform-as-a-Service environment such as IBM's Bluemix.

Mike has worked over 30 years on a wide variety of software projects at IBM, including OS/2, Java, Web services and SOA.

We will give an overview of IBM Bluemix and use it to demonstrate the “Art of the Possible” scenarios through integration of exciting new cloud services to a stodgy old web application, providing a more engaging customer experience. You will see easy integration of Java EE applications to new “born on the cloud” node.js applications leveraging instant services and runtimes such as real-time communication (WebRTC), social media like Twitter, messaging, data cache, Node-RED, Internet of Things, SQL database, Liberty Profile, and node.js. We will also demonstrate integration to existing on-premise or 3rd party Web services through IBM API Management, which provides you and your customers with new opportunities of engagement.

Kevin Postreich

Kevin Postreich is a Sr. IT specialist / consultant with IBM. He joined the World Wide Application Infrastructure technical sales team in 2012 supporting customer deployments of WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere eXtreme Scale, PureApplication System, and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR). Kevin also has a strong background in in middleware / application performance engineering and troubleshooting methodologies.
Kevin is certified with the following IBM technologies: PureApplication System, WebSphere Application Server, and SOA technologies. He is also a Master Certified I/T Specialist through the Open Group.
In his WW technical sales role, Kevin’s focus has been in the on premise cloud space which includes PureApplication System configurations, deployments, and enablement for IBM technical sales teams and customers alike.

Everyone can deploy their applications. But do you have a consistent, reliable and repeatable process across all environments from development to production ? If you want to see how to escape the shell scripts, the multiple tools and the finger crossing hero's then attend this session. We will show how you can add the automation consistence, the governance, the audit trail and the security that you need for your enterprise deployments.

Mark Roberts

Mark holds a Bachelors Degree in General Engineering and a Masters Degree in Distributed Systems Design, has over 25 years experience in a wide variety of computer systems and is a Member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer.
Mark joined Rational Software in 1999 (acquired by IBM in 2003) and after focussing on change and configuration management solutions he expanded his coverage of the software development lifecycle to include requirements and test management. Following recent acquisitions by IBM Mark expanded his portfolio to include UrbanCode for deployment and release automation, and with the Aspera Software acquisition Mark began working on fast file transfer and collaboration solutions.

Mark has delivered consultancy, training and mentoring on the IBM solutions in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, South Africa and USA.

Do you want to spend more of your time building innovative and engaging applications for customers? This session will talk about how to utilize the right tools, development environment and devops methodologies to set your team up for success. We'll cover new enhancements in the WebSphere Application Server developer tools (WDT), integrations with devOps for different middleware scenarios (develop, production, innovation, quality) and how to leverage the Bluemix runtime (Liberty(java) and Node.js) development environments.

Anita Rass Wan

Anita Rass Wan is a Senior Worldwide Product Manager on the WebSphere Application Server Infrastructure team. She is responsible for helping improve the customer and developer experience with building and managing applications for the WebSphere Application Infrastructure family both on premise and in the cloud. Anita has held various senior positions in development, release management and product management. She has published various papers, and has disclosures and a patent in application development and performance tools.

How a continuous testing approach incorporating automated integration testing and service virtualization can help to achieve the goal of continuous delivery.

Max Parker

Max has worked as a consultant in the area of quality management for more than 20 years both with IBM and with other ISV's.

Messaging has been used in central enterprise IT environments for many years delivering reliable, dependable and scalable communication with back-end systems. Modern, fast-paced IT environments based on microservices and deployment in the cloud have different requirements, but messaging is invaluable here too. Come along to hear about MQ Light and how it can help you create responsive, flexible, loosely coupled solutions for fast-paced IT environments such as web and mobile apps

Andrew Schofield

Andrew Schofield is Chief Architect for Hybrid Cloud Messaging. He has more than 25 years of experience in messaging middleware and the Internet of Things, with particular expertise in the areas of data integrity, transactions, high availability and performance. He works at the Hursley Park laboratory in England. In his spare time, Andrew writes applications for mobile phones and connects things to the internet.

This session takes a look at the changes in IIB V10 and shows how it impacts real world situations. It discusses the new possible topology options, impact on session administration/operations and the administrative security considerations. It will reflect on the difference from V9 and the new points to consider.

Callum Jackson

Callum Jackson is an Integration Solution Architect in IBM Systems Middleware Services, based in Hursley, UK. He specialises in consulting on IBM Integration Bus, IBM API Management, WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, IBM DataPower and other Connectivity and Integration products. Prior to joining Services, he was a Software Engineer in the IBM Integration Bus team, and before that he worked in Software Services on SOA applications for the telecommunications industry.

Do microservices force us to look differently at the way we lay down and evolve our integration architecture, or are they purely about how we build applications? Are microservices a new concept, or an evolution of the many ideas that came before them? What is the relationship between microservices and other key initiatives such as APIs, SOA, and Agile. In this session, we will unpick what microservices really are, and indeed what they are not. We will consider whether there is something unique about this particular point time in technology that has enables microservice concepts to take hold. Finally, we will look at if, when, where and how an enterprise can take on the benefits of microservices, and what products and technologies are applicable for that journey.

Kim Clark

Kim Clark is a senior IT specialist focusing on design issues within BPM, integration, and SOA. He has been working on projects in the IT industry since 1993, and throughout has been collating, documenting and presenting on best practices

IBM believes an API management solution is imperative to the success of externalizing the core services and data which enterprises are built on, in a secure and control manner. By providing easy assembly of new APIs, enabling security and different levels of service, providing crtical management controls and insight to developers and business users - and socializing those APIs to developers through communities and portals - organizations can differentiate themselves and open new revenue channels through what the industry is terming 'The API Economy'. This session looks to explore how API Management, both on premise, and SaaS, is helping IBM clients find a competitive edge, innovate and drive revenue using real examples from clients across a number of different geographies and industries.

Matthew Cronin

As a Client Technical Professional, Matt has been helping clients with their software needs for around 3 years now at IBM, more specifically spending the last 2 years in the integration and connectivity space. The core products Matt looks after are IBM API Management, IBM DataPower and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, tools designed to meet the needs of clients looking to secure, manage, expose and analyse their services and APIs.

This session will address the increasing importance of decision modelling in the context of business process management, with the aim to:
(1) Explore how the Object Management Group’s DMN (Decision Model and Notation) can provide a common language for the collaboration between business and IT in organisational decision-making
(2) Emphasise the power and flexibility provided by combining BPMN with DMN, as a complementary standard for tackling the decisions intertwined in your business processes
(3) Examine how IBM’s cloud-based process modelling solution, Blueworks Live, can facilitate the collaborative discovery and documentation of decisions in your organisation

Francesca Sutton

Francesca works in the UK Smarter Process technical sales team, specializing in IBM’s intelligent Business Process Management capabilities for process and decision modelling & automation. With a degree in international business, Francesca enjoys the challenge of translating her clients’ critical business imperatives into enterprise-strong and cutting edge solutions. She is also the Business Partner advocate for the IBM UK Middleware technical team, working to support IBM’s ecosystem of Partners.

Systems of insight are ever analysing and monitoring what is going on in the world, seeking out new opportunities and identifying situations that need attention and action. These systems provide the ability to apply analytics and rules to real-time data as it flows within and beyond the enterprise to gain the desired insight. Deriving this insight is a key step towards being able to make the right decisions and take the correct actions at the right time.
IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced provides a way to deliver a system of insight through enterprise-scale detect & decide automation capabilities. Combining with IBM SPSS, IBM InfoSphere Streams and IBM BPM, it offers a solution that react quickly to business opportunities or threats.

What will attendees learn from this session?
This session introduces the 'System of Insight capability model' and architectural patterns for building systems of insight with IBM Operational Decision Manager. Presented by authors of the new IBM RedBooks publication, 'Systems of Insight for the Digital Transformation Era'.
Attendees will learn how ODM can be applied to event-driven and stream-based situation detection, and analytics-driven decision automation within the context of a system of insight.

Additional Comments:
Systems of Insight is a new concept in IBM. The objective of this session is to introduce a variety of solution models or capabilities that is needed to build such a system, and focusing on solving situational detection problems.

Matt Roberts

Matt loves to build first-of-a-kind solutions for challenging business problems. As a certified IBM specialist, Matt applies his experience in process improvement, UI technologies and cloud platforms to prototype innovative solutions with his clients across the UK and Ireland. Matt now leads the adoption of Decision Server Insights in his market and has written on the topic of situation-detection architectures for the new class of Systems of Insight. Matt is a certified developer for IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM Business Process Manager.

Find out about the new capabilities that we are adding to IBM Business Process Manager 8.5.6. We have improved enterprise quality of service by introducing new migration facilities, platform management and a variety of architectural and usability improvements. New case management enhancements include better support for BPM/ECM integrations and the ability to link cases and process instances. Federated Portal infrastructure supports migration and isolation scenarios and allows our customers to massively scale their BPM environments. Additional capabilities have been added to allow customers to integrate Mobile UI with their business processes.

Claudio Tagliabue

Claudio Tag is a certified IBM technical specialist, focusing on Software as a Service and Business Transformation. 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 5 years. Through his work with clients as a domain expert for IBM's ground breaking SaaS and BPM technologies, Tag has gained significant insight into today's senior IT stakeholder motivations. Tag presented his work at several conferences around Europe.
Follow Tag on Twitter @ClaudioTag and on the IBM Expert Integrated Systems blog (http://expertintegratedsystemsblog.com/author/claudio-tagliabue).

Companies worldwide recognise Software as a Service (SaaS) as the true differentiator in today’s digital economy: no CIO agenda is complete without it.
IBM Smarter Process technologies like Blueworks Live, IBM BPM and IBM ODM help businesses gaining control and visibility of their processes and rules.
BPM and ODM on Cloud deliver the power of the Smarter Process paradigm through the simplicity and easiness of fruition of SaaS.
This session explores the value of the new BPM and ODM on Cloud offerings, helping customers choosing the best way to approach Business Transformation.

Claudio Tagliabue

Claudio Tag is a certified IBM technical specialist, focusing on Software as a Service and Business Transformation. 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 5 years. Through his work with clients as a domain expert for IBM's ground breaking SaaS and BPM technologies, Tag has gained significant insight into today's senior IT stakeholder motivations. Tag presented his work at several conferences around Europe.
Follow Tag on Twitter @ClaudioTag and on the IBM Expert Integrated Systems blog (http://expertintegratedsystemsblog.com/author/claudio-tagliabue).

Learn how you can build self-service web applications with the latest IBM Forms Experience Builder software. You will see how the software works and gain an understanding of how customers are using it to improve efficiency, customer service and time to value. The focus of this session will be how customers are using and gaining value from the software and how your organization can get started. Also hear about what's new in the 8.6.1 release.

David Butler

David Butler is a technical sales specialist working within the IBM Collaboration Solutions Brand, based in the UK. David specialises in a number of Collaboration tools, including the WebSphere Portal family (with a particular focus on IBM Forms Experience Builder) and IBM Connections. His expertise lies in providing client demonstrations which articulate the value of these offerings. He is also actively involved with driving the implementation and adoption of these products.

Do you have a complex IT ecosystem and wonder how an IBM Digital Experience can fit within it and let you capitalise upon your existing assets? Come along to this session and hear how Lloyds Banking Group managed to create a new digital experience for their corporate banking customers in just such an environment. Find out which IBM WebSphere Portal integration points were used (and which were not) and - most importantly - why. (Level: Intermediate)

Graham Harper

Graham is an Application Architect and Consulting IT Specialist with IBM Software Services for WebSphere. He has been designing and developing solutions for customers using Lotus and IBM software for 23 years and with WebSphere Portal specifically for over 10 years.

Ian Walsh

Ian is a Technical Specialist within the Lloyds Banking Digital Commercial Banking team and has been working with .Net and Java technologies for over ten years.

This session will demonstrate that IBM Forms Experience Builder (FEB) can deliver much more than surveys and feedback forms. The platform can help developers rapidly create rich and responsive web forms, using FEB to handle the basics of your page layouts, authorisation and database connectivity without any coding. This frees developers to enjoy extending the platform to create exciting applications.

Daniel Kilpatrick

Daniel Kilpatrick joined IBM in 2011 as a member of the IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solutions (ICS) technical team, covering the Digital Experiences portfolio.
Daniel specialises in social portals and collaborative tools with a focus on digital forms and is now the IBM Forms specialist for UK and Ireland. Daniel brings with him over 10 years of web and mobile software development experience.

Designing good solutions to complex business problems on the IBM WebSphere Portal platform - "Portal Applications" for short - is part art and part science. Join us in this session for some advice and best practice on the subject, gathered over many years in the field. Learn what distinguishes a good design from a mediocre one. Discover criteria and techniques for partitioning your design into multiple portlets and web application archives. Find out how to combine client-side and server-side functionality in efficient and maintainable ways.

Graham Harper

Graham is an Application Architect and Consulting IT Specialist with IBM Software Services for WebSphere. He has been designing and developing solutions for customers using Lotus and IBM software for 23 years and with WebSphere Portal specifically for over 10 years.

IBM now provides both an SDK and runtime for Java, and a SDK and runtime for JavaScript. Whilst the languages themselves share little more than the first four characters, IBMs approach is to provide a common set of free monitoring and diagnostics tools that apply to both runtimes, reducing the need to cross-skill, whilst continuing to support existing open source and 3rd party tools. This session introduces those tools, shows how they have been extended with IBM middleware product knowledge and integrated into IBM’s development tools, and how to use them either on-premise or in-cloud to investigate and resolve real-world problem scenarios.

Toby Corbin

Toby is a Software Engineer working as part of the Runtimes tools team operating out of Hursley in the UK. The team develops low overhead monitoring, profiling, and diagnostics capabilities and free Eclipse-based tools such as Health Center, Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer (GCMV), Memory Analyzer, and IBM Diagnostics Data Explorer (IDDE).
 
For the last few years, he has been focusing on providing a monitoring solution that can be adapted to multiple runtimes and integrated into new technologies. Prior to that, he worked on globalising the Java class library code

Health Center is a quick to deploy, small impact live monitoring tool running on either IBM Java Virtual machines or IBM SDK for Node.js.  The IBM SDK for Node.js ™ provides a stand-alone JavaScript ® runtime and server-side JavaScript solution for IBM platforms.  Now IBM is bringing these together with Node Application Metrics. Appmetrics instruments the Node.js runtime for performance monitoring, providing the monitoring data via an API. Additionally the data can be visualized in an Eclipse IDE using the "IBM Monitoring and Diagnostics Tools - Health Center" client.  Learn about this new technology and how you can deploy the latest Node.js technology with all the performance monitoring you've come to expect from IBM Runtimes.

Toby Corbin

Toby is a Software Engineer working as part of the Runtimes tools team operating out of Hursley in the UK. The team develops low overhead monitoring, profiling, and diagnostics capabilities and free Eclipse-based tools such as Health Center, Garbage Collection and Memory Visualizer (GCMV), Memory Analyzer, and IBM Diagnostics Data Explorer (IDDE).
 
For the last few years, he has been focusing on providing a monitoring solution that can be adapted to multiple runtimes and integrated into new technologies. Prior to that, he worked on globalising the Java class library code

Java SE 8 is the latest eagerly anticipated release of the Java platform that powers much of IBM's software and provides functionality for you to get your work done. In this session, we describe the new features currently under development in the virtual machine and associated libraries and tooling. Come and learn how to be more productive as a developer, use new techniques for exploiting modern hardware to process large volumes of data in parallel, move data efficiently across the network, and exploit the virtualization potential of your data center.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts joined IBM immediately after earning his degree two years ago and has quickly established himself as being a subject matter expert in Runtimes (formerly the Java Technology Center) for GPU exploitation and now Apache Spark. Based in Hursley, Adam is currently the team leader for Spark and will be making his first conference appearance here in Edinburgh. Adam is particularly interested in using analytics to provide meaningful insights and is looking forward to future customer engagements whereby IBM's talents can be demonstrated. Adam's background involves developing with Java and writing commercial mobile apps for Android and iOS. He's also madly in love with Linux (especially running on Z or Power) but still runs Windows on his laptop to this very day...

Apache Spark is an exciting new open-source cluster computing framework, architected to provide high performance for Big Data workloads, including machine learning.  Join this talk to learn the fundamental concepts of big data analytics, how Apache Spark could play a role in your data center, and how IBM is investing to maximise Spark's performance on IBM hardware.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts joined IBM immediately after earning his degree two years ago and has quickly established himself as being a subject matter expert in Runtimes (formerly the Java Technology Center) for GPU exploitation and now Apache Spark. Based in Hursley, Adam is currently the team leader for Spark and will be making his first conference appearance here in Edinburgh. Adam is particularly interested in using analytics to provide meaningful insights and is looking forward to future customer engagements whereby IBM's talents can be demonstrated. Adam's background involves developing with Java and writing commercial mobile apps for Android and iOS. He's also madly in love with Linux (especially running on Z or Power) but still runs Windows on his laptop to this very day...