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.

These chunks of land would be enought to build a Google theme park or – to be more on topic – addressing the issue of rising power costs, to install a nuclear power station. This would provide kind of clean energy, but would not be very sexy, looking a the high risks implied.

So the only purpose for these sites with big green Google will be to build modern high efficient datacenters and also highly modern power plants utilizing renewable energy. Google already invests in companies developing such technologies, as you can read on Googles Website in an article titled “powering a clean enery revolution” <HERE>.

Now we will be able to understand the meaning of “grid computing”.

What do you think?

So probably, there will not be a big war, It’s more like sharing the cake.

Roland