What do service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the cloud share?

David Linthicum: Cloud computing really is a way to do SOA. It’s an architectural option as you build service-oriented architecture. At its essence, service-oriented architecture is an architecture pattern. In other words, it’s basically a way of doing something; it’s a way of approaching architecture and looking at systems as sets of services and rebuilding those services in such a way that they’re able to change very easily as the business changes. That gives you the whole agility aspect of service-oriented architecture.

In other words, we can host the services either on premise, or we can host them now with the capabilities in cloud-based services such as Amazon, 3tera, Microsoft and other emerging technologies. So that’s where the links are.

Do many people come first to cloud and don’t necessarily see that connection with SOA?

Linthicum: What I see is a lot of people that are building service-oriented architectures in the cloud and not even knowing they’re doing it. So in other words, they’re just leveraging systems that leverage services and they’re building mashups and composites out on these cloud-based systems and leveraging all these various services on the back-end systems and just these wonderful applications that are completely living on the Internet. When you look at the architecture, there’s not a lot of forethought that went into building those things. But they are service-oriented architectures nonetheless — or are at least using service-oriented architecture patterns.

http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid201_gci1374671,00.html

Recently, SearchSOA.com editor Jack Vaughan spoke with David Linthicum, the author of Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, published by Addison Wesley. Linthicum has worked for many years in the IT industry and is a respected writer and speaker within the enterprise computing community. These days he devotes his time to cloud computing.

I just talked with Bob Moul, CEO of the software-as-a-service integration company Boomi, and he’s seeing more requests for companies to connect legacy, enterprise EDI infrastructure with SaaS applications.

Moul’s in a good place to spot how alternative IT approaches are taking shape in businesses, including how well SaaS is meshing with the legacy IT world. Boomi sells an online integration platform, where companies pay a monthly fee per connected instance to link SaaS to other software. About 75% of its business is connecting SaaS apps to conventional on-premises software. The rest is SaaS to SaaS.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/08/boomi_ceo_edi_l.html;jsessionid=NMP0TLYI3PBE3QE1GHRSKHWATMY32JVN

Moul offers the example of converting data from a SaaS-based warehouse management system into EDI format for transactions with legacy on-premises software

Truth be told, I have an interesting connection to Trip. While he was at Stanford, he was an intern at Creative Strategies. He served as the company’s first PC analyst. I was the second, having joined the company after he graduated and went to work for Apple. Sadly, I never had the privilege of working directly with him. Of course, I’ve followed his exploits in the gaming world for decades, and whenever he speaks about the state of the game market or trends in games, I listen.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351334,00.asp

Trip thinks the cloud might become the most disruptive, as well as the most efficient, way to play and deliver games.

The basics: privacy, security, and data portability. When your data is in someone else’s hands, it’s given less protection under the law than if it were on your hard drive. E-mail in Outlook is given more protection from government surveillance than e-mail at Gmail. That’s an unfair tilt in the playing field against cloud enterprises, and the law ought to be fixed.

http://www.cio.com/article/498795/A_Great_Cloud_Debate_Zittrain_Counters_CIO.com_Criticism_

Does an iPhone count as part of the cloud since it fits in your pocket? For these purposes, yes. In a key respect—that of your freedom to control your code and data—these devices act like cloud services.

Tell us about your service?

William Borghetti: Sendside was founded back at the end of 2005, and early 2006, to address the shortcomings of email. If you look at communications today in your mail stream, such as the bills you receive, healthcare information, and financial information, it’s staggering to see how much remains in your snail mail stream. Sendside was founded to really look at why that’s the case, and not only from the usability and functional standpoint, but to address the structural deficiencies in SMTP, to create a product robust enough to deliver to organizations and individuals. We set out to build a communications network which addresses the shortcomings, in a way which you can send branded, secure communications in a highly functional say, where you can do things people only dream of in email–so you know when a message is read, if it’s been forwarded to others, how much time people have spent with the content, an ability to recall it after it’s been sent, modify it, add attachments after the fact, and more. It’s obviously an infrastructure type of technology, applicable to every vertical — state and local government, healthcare organizations, financial services companies, banks, alternative asset managers–anyone who sells products, services, sends outs information to prospective customers, and wants to reach them in an interactive way.

http://www.techrockies.com/story/0023186.html