Dick Weisinger| Formtek
“The fact of the matter is that the best and most effective way to move to the cloud for an enterprise whose technology platforms reflect decades of enterprise IT neglect is to use SOA as an approach and process. Just don’t call it ‘SOA’,” writes David Linthicum, CTO of Blue Mountain Labs for InfoWorld. Linthicum said that “SOA and cloud computing are related one to the other.
Service oriented architecture is all about sharing services and sharing information, processes, and agility integration and governance. And cloud computing is all about providing architectural options, such as software as a service, database on service, and platform on demand.”
“The thing to remember about SOA is that the ‘A’ is for Architecture. SOA is a pattern of architecture, something you do. It’s not something you purchase, which was the core confusion around SOA as the technology vendors attempted for many years to tightly couple SOA with their products,” explains Linthicum on GigaOm.
Brenda Michelson, business technology adviser, explains that “The immediate benefit of combining SOA and Cloud Computing is time. Reaching out to the cloud for business or technology capabilities, allows SOA initiatives to compress time to value. In the longer term, the benefits include improved collaboration, customer satisfaction and business growth. By offering SOA based business capabilities to the cloud, businesses can improve interactions with business partners and existing customers, and/or generate new revenue streams.”
Rob High, CTO of IBM’s Watson, added that “When you bring these forces together, then everything about the cloud is about services and service-orientation. The cloud infrastructure is itself a service provided to those who want to create software programs to run in the cloud… The programs running on the cloud may themselves be implemented using SOA-related technologies. Services offered from the cloud may be composed with other in-house and public cloud services to create SOA-based composite applications. So, we see SOA being applied prevalently to cloud computing at many levels.”
