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.
]]>While Software-as-a-Service
covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service
, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?
Especially predictions No 4
By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]
and No 5
By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]
are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….
Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps
Roland
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