I've just got in from the Troux Technologies all day seminar which was hosted at the Chelsea Football stadium. What a great day full of interesting topics and I was also fortunate to meet some very interesting people to chat to as well.

There were many plus points to the Application set they offer:

• It takes a Business Centric approach over an IT centric approach. Refreshing for a change.
• It complies with all the ideals of an Agile and Adaptive world. Deliver value every month, iteratively, using a well defined meta-model as a stable base, and build up the Enterpise picture month after month, on project after project, continuously improving the enterprise model. 
• The fact that the Application they showed seems to have the soundest concept in my mind of what EA really is understood to be right now
• It's written in one of the most modern standards (J2EE ) 
• It uses a true systems architectural concept of separating out the Operational side from the Reporting and BI side.
• It can expose APIs and Services using SOAP.
• It has many really useful reporting types that are actually meaningful to the Business users.
• It's the first proper IT and Enterprise Descision Support system out there, which uses both Models and a DB repository (metaverse) they call it.

However, one of the things that probably stood out most for myself and two other people I spoke to was the fact that in general there seems to be a divide between the Northern hemisphere and the Southern hemisphere (Antipodeans) in terms of Enterprise Architecture. Or smaller versus bigger countries maybe? I remember doing similar sorts of things they were talking about in 1995 in South Africa. A collegue I spoke to did similar things back in 2004 at a company in Australia and even showed me on his laptop.

We talked about this and put it down to the fact that in these smaller countries, Architects tend to have to be Generalists and not Specialists. So an Architect in the Southern hemi-sphere or small country like the Netherlands, would have had to have breadth and depth, business and technology knowledge to cope, whereas in the UK and the US, people tend to specialise far more and hence do not resonate with certain broad and big picture concepts very easily when they are shown to them. The real difference was the fact that back in those days we did not have the correct tools for the job. At least now the tools are starting to move toward a more mature state, and indeed even match the newer SOA Architectures we are proposing the business take on board.

There was a great discussion about Modelling (one of my personal passions) and I liked where they were going with their thinking. I'll do a separate blog on that and some other things I picked up there sometime.

It was a great day however and I look forward to exploring this Troux EA toolset (Application) in a lot more depth and watch it continue to grow and mature over time too.