Integration on the Edge: Data Explosion & Next-Gen Integration

The principles behind Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) were established long before the Internet became a force, and certainly before the appearance of Cloud infrastructure.

Although many people consider SOA as well as Cloud to all about ways of building, deploying and managing applications, these technologies and methodologies are also important in making "big data" useful and manageable. Indeed, SOA and Cloud are increasingly becoming so intertwined as to cause major confusion in the marketplace.

Let's be clear - there's SOA, and there's Cloud and there's the intersection of SOA and Cloud. That intersection is a very exciting place to be.

I remember long discussions on things like CICS which embodied many of the principals behind SOA, and I'm sure there are technologies (and methodologies) older than that which similarly embody various principals of Cloud as well as SOA). Like so many things in this industry, the more things change, the more they seem strangely (though never entirely) similar. I suppose that's evolution for you.

Although SOA's success in the enterprise has been mixed, the power of SOA is evident. The strength of SOA's core principals has been illustrated by the SOA's ability to embrace (and in some ways help define) new technologies such as Web services and the Internet. This evolution of SOA is happening again with the proliferation of elastic Cloud computing technologies.

Cloud-based data services leveraging platforms such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure offer the possibility of tremendous and "instant" scalability for compute power, storage, and other resources, and can provide significant other advantages (e.g. response time, economics, time-to-value, cost to develop/test).

Enterprises AND software companies seeking competitive advantage through IT innovation should be aware of this technology shift and actively defining strategies for capitalizing on it.