How Will SOA Vendors Adapt to the Emerging Cloud Paradigm?

The essential component for adaptation to the cloud environment is SOA Governance capabilities.

In the foreseeable future, cloud adds more complexity, not less into the already overburdened IT environment. It solves one set of business problems (elastic scalability and variable cost model) but creates additional complexity of integration.

Because of this, the SOA vendors will absolutely need to articulate their SOA Governance strategies.

Vendors whose strategies are filled with hastiliy grabbed partners and a patchwork of solution will not be able to provide the kind of smooth interoperation of governance lifecycle stages as will vendors who have had a long and consistent strategy involving both a core governance product as well as a broader ecosystem strategy.

The reason being is that most Enterprises will be called upon to integrate both on and off premise capabilities. This will require management and governance of the whole network of distributed capabilities to ensure security, reliability, interoperability and all of the other "ilities".

I agree with Dave Linthicum in his recent post that the rise of the cloud will reshuffle the deck a bit in the vendor world: (also the inspiration for this forum question!)
http://www.infoworld.com/d/architecture/one-good-thing-about-cloud-computing-and-soa-586

It will be interesting to see SOA vendors more aggressively move into the cloud space. Go they must.

But the folks in the cloud world will also increasingly see that SOA tools and platforms offer approaches they need for cohesive solutions that meet the requirements of enterprises. The SOA world has spent the past several years getting things right, particularly governance. This technology needs to now be transferred to the cloud world.

Miko - well, you would say that, wouldn't you? :-)
Joe - agreed.

My 2p: we'll see them all leap into the Cloud, one way or another - and sooner rather than later. Vordel's recent move (Vordel 5 Cloud Edition) is a great example - see http://www.vordel.com/news/press/24_02_09.html

I don't see where "cloud" (and could I hate the term more than I currently do?) represents any major change for SOA governance vendors. Every major player has been looking to use policy to clamp down on renegade services. If anything, as Joe noted, many users may discover that this SOA governance stuff can help with this cloud stuff too. It's really just a matter of marketing to get out that message.

The big change on the product side, IMO, is going to be that the virtualization inherent in all of this will require SOA governance and management solutions to perform comprehensive virtual systems management as well. And that might create an opening for traditional systems management vendors (HP, IBM, CA, BMC) and interlopers from the virtualization space (VMware) to further invade what we currently consider to be the SOA governance and management space.

SOA vendors have already learned the difficulty of getting enterprise customers to trust their systems to a distributed, loosely coupled set of services. So in technical terms I think they should have a headstart on strategy and methodology for leveraging themselves as services in the cloud. The real challenge will be on the business side - how successfully will they be able to move from a project model to monetize their Cloud approach in an incremental fashion.

Pre-configured virtualized SOA platform appliances that can be ordered up and turned on in the Cloud will simplify the confusion and overhead of installing and configuring SOA platforms. With that nonsense out of the way, developers can focus on building and deploying services. My guess is that following that stage, there will be a focus on monitoring and tuning, which will bode well for network management platforms that have oriented toward working with SOA platforms.

Disclaimer: I'm using SOA platform because that terminology is well understood, but I still believe it's a misnomer and it gives me the gee-willies even writing it! :-)

Just had a few discussions about Cloud and SOA this week. Many Cloud based front-end’s and application tools actually assume a SOA in the backend, and if possible with fine-grained services (for a richer user interactivity). So in this respect, the Cloud is actually a SOA catalyst.

Has anyone asked you whether "SOA is dead" recently?

SOA alongwith other technologies such as Virtualization, Grid Computing, Broadband Networks, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, etc. form the foundation for Cloud Computing. We all know how hot Cloud Computing is being in the very early stages of its hype cycle. So it stands to reason that SOA vendors will very likely jump on the Cloud Computing bandwagon in order to marginalize any discussion about the relevance of SOA. After all, as they would say, how can SOA be dead if it forms a foundation for the "new" best thing since sliced bread - Cloud Computing?

This eBizQ thread got a few of us talking here in the hallways… Tim Hall, our Director of SOA Center and I started going back and forth on this…It is thought provoking all the way around about what changes and challenges Cloud can impose on IT organizations planning to source Cloud-based services in their solutions and whether the products and capabilities delivered by what have been traditionally called SOA platform and/or SOA governance vendors will continue to be useful for IT as they move to leverage Cloud. I think it’s key to think hard about these questions, with a perspective of what IT is going to need and what today’s solutions actually do…perhaps with more of a focus on the people and processes rather than the underlying technologies enabling these kinds of solutions.

I firmly believe that governance is a must-have for adoption of Cloud services or applications. In Dave Linthicum’s blog, he states that design-time SOA governance solutions may be at risk. There are, at least, three different aspects to the adoption of Cloud-based services which should be familiar to those who have been effectively employing SOA Governance solutions thus far:

1. Establishing the relationship between enterprise IT and a cloud-based service provider (regardless of the kind of service being consumed) demands some measure of process. Enterprise IT should broker the selection, procurement (incl. negotiating payment terms), and publishing/exposure of approved cloud-based services to their internal constituents.

2. Next, applications built to leverage cloud-based services (either Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service) are going to have to be built to comply with the constructing organization’s design-time goals (to ensure quality, interoperability, performance, backward and forward compatibility as examples). As a sidebar, I have seen poorly performing applications written in a wide variety of technologies. But, in the context of cloud, you will absolutely PAY for more CPU, etc. based on usage. It seems prudent that performance validation is essential when consuming IaaS.

3. Finally, comprehensive lifecycle governance that drives consistency through shared best practices and policy management becomes even more critical as organizations continue towards a mixed mode of service delivery (i.e. a combination of in-house, on-premise applications either built or bought along with an outsourced or off-premise XaaS offerings). Enterprise IT is still responsible for ensuring a stable and reliable compute platform for their business stakeholders regardless of the means upon which that is delivered. In addition, the monitoring and enforcement of a variety of corporate (or other regulated) policies is also still up to traditional IT departments to enforce; regardless of the ways in which these composite systems are assembled.
What we've learned from SOA governance should actually provide IT with the blueprint and tools they need to support these processes and activities. And,

Products providing technical governance (SOA and otherwise) that don't take a comprehensive lifecycle approach will be less attractive to IT anyway regardless of the adoption of cloud-based services and we are seeing this play out in the market through increasing customer requirements and product evolutions. What I’m hearing is that organizations want solutions that integrate across the lifecycle from portfolio planning to design and testing to delivery and on-going operations with transparency and sharing of key metadata to drive decisions in real-time. For example with Cloud-based services, if the teams responsible for operations and ensuring critical SLAs have visibility into the criteria by which the service was designed and tested, they can then know the services’ underlying architectural characteristics and how such services will respond to levels of consumption (service elasticity, performance profiles and so forth). There is much less margin for error in a Cloud model as SLA delivery is assumed and issues can put Cloud vendors out of business.

Governance is about driving best practices, changing organizational behavior and making more intelligent decisions throughout a lifecycle of delivering solutions -- across application development teams and their operations counterparts...whether these solutions involve in-sourced development and integration or sourcing apps and services via SaaS or Cloud-based models.

So my final point? Yes, “SOA� governance vendors may be at risk; they are at risk of having to change the name of the game. Governance will be needed even more, but not just for SOA… it’s time to get SOA off the island and consider it part of a larger modern IT approach that embraces legacy apps, service-orientation, SaaS and cloud sourced services, events, business processes, Rich internet apps and more. All of this needs governance, now more than ever...