Since joining Oracle I have been working across the various product teams in the Fusion Middleware Group, to create a vision for what I'm currently calling "Next Generation Grid Enabled SOA". I recently published an article on the subject in SOA Magazine.
In short, the SOA grid concept takes scalability and continuous availability beyond the SOA infrastructure peices that vendors provide, and allows your own services, and the stateful orchestrations that control their interactions, to also enjoy continuous availability and predictable scalability WITHOUT the need to write everything as stateless services, and without the need to wire in databases for managing state.
I have also started taking the SOA grid message out on the road at conferences and at select customer sites. I recently presented the SOA Grid at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing in Vienna. Steve Jones, Director of SOA and SaaS, from CapGemini wrote this blog from the audience during the talk. Its good affirmation that the vision is being well received, but more importantly that having a vision is helping Oracle to further establish thought leadership in the SOA space.
Dave
