In the keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that ‘cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, with services being put together like Lego blocks’ <READHERE>. My guess is that Mr. Bittman tried to say, that cloud computing will intrinsically tied to Saas. But is that true? Let’s first discuss what the point with cloud computing is. Is it just a new buzzword for modern service providers with very flexible provisioning features and/or highly distributed high capacity datacenters? Or is it a new computing paradigm, enabling users to write applications capable dealing with thousand times higher computing capacity, like Google asks students promoting their cloudy mindset <HERE>. So whats the point?

The close relationship between Clouds and SOA is common sense (see interview with IBM Autonomics director <HERE>). That may be the reason, why all big IT vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Novell and thelike  have broadened their portfolios in the past few years and will be able to not only offer platforms for building service enabled applications, but are also providing/buying technology for automating data center management and provisioning.

So managing clouds is the new Infrastructure paradigm (vs. on-premise or ’serverhugging’), while SOA might be the new application development paradigm (vs. ERP dinosaurs)? If it was that simple, then we probably will have thousands of providers, providing 2nd Tier service offerings and several large scale 1st Tier infrastructure providers offering cheap and enormous computing power.

Even if I haven’t looked into topics like security or IAM, the paradigm shift may be a long way, thinking of todays heterogenous computing landscape. Key to success might be the possibility to be able to provision, manage and support large scale (utility) systems. For that reasons I’m really glad to work in the interesting area of ITSM, BSM and Automation <RELATED_READING>, which definitly will be the key to the future.