SOA in Action Blog

1) Flexibility and agility. "The IT environment is becoming more and more a strategic element of the busioness strategy for our customers. As the business changes, as the business requirements change, IT has to become more ands more flexible, more and more agile, more and more able to deal with that change."

2) Analytics. "There's been a lot of talk of business information, business analytics becoming more and more useful, there's a lot of data that our customers have that is important to be able to be used when they're making decisions. We believe that having business intelligence and analytic tools bridges the gap, from today where only a few people have access to this key information, to a point where everybody has access within the context of their transactional systems, as opposed to separate business intelligence systems."

3) End-user empowerment. "Clearly there has been a move toward self-service processing, self-service access, pervasive access to the IT services. Over the last few years, there's been a big focus on making the collaborative enterprise be more efficient. How do you eneble groups of people to interact with each other, have access to the systems and resources, as well how you incorporate some of the Web 2.0-type capabilities that are obviously becoming very, very popular? Not just in the consumer side but also in the enterprise. How do you make it so they can be part of the enterprise IT infrastructure, as opposed to a completely separate system that people use -- whether it's blogging or wikis or tagging, etc.?  How do we make that first-class cistizen part of your business infrastructure, as part of the applications?"

1) System capabilities. "There is a lot of processing power becoming available on systems. multi-core processing. More and more compute power. Larger and larger memories are becoming available."

2) Data center architecture. "Again, a lot of discussion around consolidation, virtualization. How do you get more efficiency out of your existing resources by doing consolidation by virtualizing those capabilities? Not just your system resources, but also how do manage these things more efficiently in terms of human resources required??

3) Services-based delivery model. "There is a lot of focus around software as a service. The popular term over the last six to 12 months has been the cloud. Fundamentally, customers are wanting to deliver their key services, or key IT systems as services, whether its ISVs or customers, who might want to do that private to their enterprise, as opposed to necessarily doing it to a public cloud environment."