Alasdair Mangham, head of information systems and development at the London Borough of Camden, said the borough expects 15-23 per cent of its budget to be axed. “That will change the game for how local authorities deliver services,” said Mangham. “The only thing you can cut back is people.”

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2262813/soa-save-local-public-sector

Public sector spending cuts could force cloud service rollouts through service-oriented architecture.

Today’s enterprise environment is rapidly changing. The disparate mix of operating systems, applications and databases for businesses and organizations increasingly characterizes the IT system landscape, exacerbated by consolidation across nearly all industry sectors. Service-agnostic cloud computing and frameworks to efficiently harness, provision, launch, debug, and manage distributed services virtualized across the enterprise poses both, a great challenge and an opportunity to streamline business operations

http://www.informationweek.com/whitepaper/Software/Service-Oriented-Architecture/cloud-computing-implementation-frameworks-and-so-wp1259958167418;jsessionid=HXEJOAGFYQI1RQE1GHOSKH4ATMY32JVN?cid=iwhome_wp_Softw

This paper addresses key software infrastructure requirements for SOA-enabled systems to leverage cloud computing to deploy next generation, flexible, distributed, scalable, and cloud-ready business applications.

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.

This week’s been interesting so far. SAP announced earnings this week and the figures aren’t a cause for celebration. In contrast, NetSuite’s OpenAir group has been conducting their annual user conference in Boston with a pretty good-sized crowd of attendees. The company’s leaders have made a couple of big announcements at the show but one of these announcements has some subtleties that should really rattle old school, on-premise ERP vendors.

OpenAir announced their Open Connect capability. Essentially, this permits their SRP (services resource planning) solution to connect, out of the box, with solutions from Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SAP and Oracle. So what, you may ask. Isn’t that what modern platform products (i.e., products built upon services oriented architectures (SOA)) are supposed to do? Yes, but in this case, the delivery models they are connecting to are both on-premise and cloud based. Also, some of these connections will be to products that are multi-tenant (and hence changing/updating/improving daily) while others are not. Open Connect, therefore, must provide not only 1-time integration between two systems at the time of systems implementation but also continuous integration between systems that get continual updates.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/sommer/?p=685

If Your ERP Provider can’t to multi-tenancy, How can they do this????

How should IT leaders scale virtualized environments so that they can be managed for elasticity payoffs? What should be taking place in virtualized environments now to get them ready for cloud efficiencies and capabilities later?

And how do service-oriented architecture (SOA), governance, and adaptive infrastructure approaches relate to this progression, or road map, from tactical virtualization to powerful and strategic cloud computing  outcomes?

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68405.html?wlc=1255981134

What is today a virtualized environment may need to grow into a cloud computing operation in the future. How should IT leaders approach the task of focusing on service? How do they take their infrastructure, servers, storage and networks and make sure the plumbing and connectivity is agile enough to support the business?

It is Thursday morning, you are the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news: the board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you are looking for a call-to-action to get everyone planning for the next steps.

You talk to the sales executives about the integration of both sales forces within three months, and they are excited about the new prospects. You talk to the human resources director, who is ready to address the changes HR must make within two months. You speak to the buildings and maintenance director, who can have everyone moved who needs to be moved within three months. Your heart is filled with pride.

However, when you ask the CIO about changing the core business processes to drive the combined companies, the response is much less enthusiastic. “I’m not sure we can change our IT architecture to accommodate the changes in less than 18 months, and I’m not even sure if that’s possible,” says the CIO. “We

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1398772

IT has become the single-most visible point of latency when a business needs to change. However, it does not have to be this way. David S. Linthicum discusses how things got off track and how SOA and Cloud Computing can fix it.

Although cloud computing, in its current form, is only a couple of years old with fairly limited adoption, it’s already becoming a commodity.

Every hosting company in the planet has already jumped in, trying to forestall any potential loss of market share to any number of emerging cloud computing infrastructure providers. However, given the downturn in the economy and the simple fact that there is a lot more server capacity than applications to run on them, the companies that provide cloud computing services are already engaged in a bruising price war.

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/vizard/cloud-computing-the-end-game/?cs=36152

they also provide application testing capabilities and host commercial applications in the hopes of developing a portfolio of software-as-a-service applications.

Is cloud computing possible without SOA?

Yes, but don’t expect things to move very smoothly.

Is SOA possible without cloud computing?

Of course. But don’t expect any impetus toward the loose coupling model you’re trying to promote.

I just listened to a podcast with Mike Kavis, CTO of M-Dot, who sat down with my colleague at ebizQ, Peter Schooff, to talk about SOA and the cloud and the advantages and difficulties enterprises face moving from SOA to the cloud.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=2904

Is cloud computing possible without SOA?

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on open standards and global interoperability within and between enterprises, today announced the availability of two new industry standards: the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) and SOA Governance Framework. OSIMM will provide an industry recognized maturity model for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses. The SOA Governance Framework is a free guide for organizations to apply proven governance standards that will accelerate service-oriented architecture success rates.

Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model to Help Organizations Maximize Business Benefits from Their SOA and Cloud Adoptions

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/soainaction/2009/08/cloud_need_not_be_a_venture_in.php

One of the things that holds back companies and developers from engaging with cloud resources is simply the fact that the cloud represents the unknown. However, once you get past that, there’s another pressing issue that companies moving into the cloud face — getting the various off-site applications to communicate and pass data between one another