The SOA Leaders Council, a community of service oriented architecture visionaries, today announced the launch of the New York chapter of the SOA Leaders Council, serving SOA, XML and Web services technology influencers and decision makers in the New York metropolitan area. Hosted by CitiGroup, and sponsored by the SOA Leaders benefactors AmberPoint, Parasoft, Reactivity, Systinet and ThoughtWorks, the kick-off event, scheduled for Wednesday, March 2, 2005, will feature leading Burton Group analyst Anne Thomas Manes and Skip Snow, vice president of architecture at CitiGroup, discussing reference architectures for creating and deploying SOAs.

The Chicago Chapter of SOA Leaders also announced its next event will take place on Wednesday, February 9, 2005, and will feature Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group, Bob Steelhammer, senior director of eBusiness at Motorola and Sean Fletcher, enterprise architect for Motorola, leading an interactive discussion on how to construct a useful reference architecture. The Chicago group's kick-off event last October attracted 25 of the area's leading strategic practitioners of SOA, XML and Web services discussing reusability, service ownership in the organization, security integration and management and best practices for successful initiatives.