Business Transformation in Action

Okay, everyone is still buzzing about Anne Thomas Manes' declaration that "SOA is Dead." While that particular thought is still being hotly debated, there's been another tectonic shift taking place underneath the feet of enterprise and SOA architects. That is, that the huge expansion of the cloud, both within our collective imaginations and within parts of our enterprises, and this represents the next phase of SOA.

Brenda Michelson provides her thoughts on the architectural implications of cloud computing here at ebizQ, building on her mantra -- developed during the formative days of SOA -- that "boxes" are morphing into "platforms." Meaning that service orientation lifts the focus of enterprise computing from servers and hardware to a more abstract layer.

Brenda says cloud computing is still an open question, adding that she is "far from done with SOA, event processing, business architecture, enterprise architecture, active information and the business-IT relationship." To a large degree, cloud computing is a natural extension of these topic areas, and one enterprise architects need to start watching closely.