SOA in Action Blog

I talked the other day about what a disruptive force the three dynamos -- SOA, cloud, and open source -- are introducing to the business technology marketplace. Expect to see major disruptions as this tripartite advances up the food chain.

Well, it just so happens that right here at the ebizQ site, Neil Ward-Dutton also weighed in with his own observations on what the growing convergence between SOA and cloud computing means to enterprises.

I like the way Neil connects the dots between cloud and SOA -- that many future SOA projects are likely to be based on services not orginating from inside the firewall. Essentially, the Cloud is SOA extended beyond the firewall:

"The bulk of the service-oriented IT that many organizations will interact with will be 'stuff from outside' (commercially provided services) rather than 'stuff from inside' (internally developed services). And it's not just hosted SaaS providers who are playing here of course: there's the issue of newer versions of on-premise commercial packaged application software products and integrations between them - SOA is coming in by the back door there, too (see SAP's ESOA, Oracle's Fusion Architecture)."

And, the bottom line in all this, Niel points out, is that effective deployment of cloud services demands service oriented architecture methldologies. "Regardless of where services come from (and indeed because they will come from multiple places, creating cross-enterprise service networks), it's increasingly the case that in order to deliver effective IT capabilities in the 21st Century, you need to understand SOA principles and build technology and management structures that really support the principles of service orientation."