Her point with the original post:  SOA got sold as a thing in itself, when really it was just set of principles to free up IT to be more responsive to deliver something of value to the business.  Go back to the definition – it’s just a service architecture – a means to an end.

The part of the talk I liked:  Technology people love to talk about the means, not the end – or as Anne said – “Don’t sell architecture to business people.. that is what gets you into trouble.”

Sometimes we make the same mistake talking about cloud computing.  Lots of focus on the ‘how it works’  but do the business people really care if it’s public, private, open source, built on microsoft, force or run by hamsters spinning in a cage?

A recession isn’t good for anybody – but maybe it forces us to think of cloud computing in cold hard business terms – how are you going to survive by either finding new ways to make money (sell your old data or new services via APIs) or blow away your existing cost structure?   There are business people putting pressure on the cloud computing vendors to talk in these terms – not about architecture.

Why should customers care ??

As a consumer, I have no idea what tools or fabrication process was used to build my car. The percentage of people that want that level of detail is very small. I think the same is true for cloud customers. Do they know what language the EC2 load balancers were written in, I don’t think so.  Nor do they care. Different vendors will take different approaches. Like everything else, all that customers will care about is what are they getting and how much does it cost ?

Open Source is great for innovation and interoperability (de facto standards). Enterprises started adopting OSS because it was “accessable”. Much easier to get a copy of MySQL then a copy of Oracle to start a pilot. Same was true for JBoss vs. weblogic/websphere. Enterprises have successfully used open source for pricing pressure w/ existing vendors. Open Source has a GREAT future. It is mainstream, it has and always be part of our the technology fabric.

Michael Healey recently wrote “8 questions to ask before going live in the cloud“. Good read. We see customers going through this  general thought process:

• what is the business driver (generally time to market or costs) ?
• what is the ‘pilot’ application (new application are easier)
• select team, infrastructure/platform provider.
• focus on the security/compliance/visibility
• deliver project
• measure ROI (generally not required, as it is obvious)
• move to mission critical application

Most enterprise cloud applications are being driven by business/IT folks are focused on helping their business counterparts on time to market. it is important to approach w/ caution, but try to jump in fast…the water feels fine after you are in . No big bang approach about replacing data centers etc., just start with baby steps.

- 50% of all folks interviewed (enterprises with more than $1B in revenue) are doing cloud computing
- 66% of those do not have a security strategy
- RSA has put together a “Security for Business Innovation” council comprised of 10 security executives chosen by RSA.

Kudos to RSA for taking a customer centric approach. There is a shift happening in enterprise computing, it is becoming Web centric. The Web has been very successful in creating de facto standards without formal standard bodies, hopefully we have learned from it. Much like the Web, cloud computing adoption will have a life of it is own. Instead of trying to control it, lets guide it.

Market/Customer:
This is by far the most important perspective. Let’s take a current example: as cloud computing becomes part of enterprise computing, customers will go with the hybrid approach. if you keep hearing that (as we have), it becomes very clear that having an on-premise and on-demand offering will fit very well with their needs/strategy.

Strategy:
Independent of the technical reasons to do or not to do, there are probably strategic reasons that are more important. For example, Salesforce.com probably got many requests to make their technology available on-premise. Hard to do when the KEY differentiation is ‘no software.’ The other aspect is DNA. Running an on-demand application needs different kinds of folks that the ones traditional software companies usually have.

Technology/Architecture:
- On-premise software is designed to ship, so one has to worry about size of image, install scripts, platform dependencies etc. These factors affect the overall architecture much more than one thinks.
- On-demand software/site is designed for scale, ease of use, zero downtime etc.
- If on-premise software is designed for simplicity and scale, it is much easier to make it available available on-demand – the other way round is much more difficult.
- Much like open source. Technology that was not designed to be open source is very hard to open source.

In general customers want flexibility, too much of which leads to increased complexity. Vendors have to start by answering simple questions like why and how.

SOA is an approach. Much like OOP (object oriented programming). Make building and maintaining IT systems more efficient.

Cloud Computing is about enabling technology. Much like Client/Server or Web Computing, the drivers are costs and time to market/revenue.

ALL customers that we talk to get the difference. Not sure why there is so much confusion.

“Cloud computing” contains the seeds of IT’s next generation – YES. This is real, much like client server and Web computing… in fact probably has benefits of both – cost and revenue.

Cloud’s customers (slide #16) – great customer segmentation. would like to add that almost all enterprise customers are using cloud for revenue or customer service related projects and using time to market/costs as the major drivers.

The systems vendors will not dominate (slide #22). This one requires a double take. James makes the point that for a vendor to succeed, it requires operations excellence in Web scale data center operations and system companies have expertise in managing enterprise data centers – wrong skills. This may seem like Wow! comment for many have not been through this, but for anybody who has built, deployed and managed enterprise apps. vs. Web apps they know the difference. The mindset is very different. The smart vendors are aware of this and will either focus on their sweet spot or acquire/grow into this space.