SOA Roundup: Platforms, Intangibles, and End-Users
February 28, 2010 in SOA Implementation, SOA Solutions by admin
In many ways, cloud computing and SOA are one in the same, or intersect to cover much of the same ground. Dave Linthicum drives this point home, providing evidence that cloud computing is resurrecting interest in SOA. As Dave so emphatically put it in his latest post here at ebizQ: “There are those out there that like to remove SOA from the
cloud computing discussion, and that’s a huge mistake… I suspect I’ll
be blogging a lot on this issue during the remainder of the year.”
When looking at cloud, of course, look at platform services. In a new ebizQ feature, Sam Charrington provided a good overview of cloud computing and Platform as a Service (PaaS). “There is little doubt that the various forms of cloud computing will play an increasingly important role for organizations seeking to gain a competitive advantage,” he says. “Much of this attention will be directed towards cloud platforms in 2010. Compared to IaaS, PaaS provides a higher level of abstraction, decreased operating costs, and increased scalability without the operational complexity that accompanies IaaS.”
In his latest post, Michael Poulin talked about the intangible value of services, such as consumer satisfaction and loyalty. This is not just something line-of-business managers should be worrying about, he says. “Developers in IT that they are as responsible for these values as their business functional and marketing departments, that intangible service values ought to be embedded into the automated business solutions,” he says, backing up his assertions with a real-life example of a bank customer who needed to pay bi-national taxes (poor guy).
The business user is what we’re doing all this service-orienting for, and Tom Allanson provides pointers on how to respect the business user amidst all the project work needed to stand up applications. Remember, he says, “business users are simply professionals whose expertise
is in a subject other than programming.”