David Bressler, SOA & Cloud Evangelist for Progress Actional is up now, talking about the Impact of Cloud Computing on Enterprise Application Architecture:
“Cloud Computing will change enterprise consumption of IT, but challenges around data management, no longer “owned” by the individual application, pose a threat. These include: how to keep data accurate and in the right hands; how to add new sources; how to provide contextual information; and how to successfully drive this all into a business-users hands. In this session David Bressler, SOA Evangelist, Progress Software, will outline the “new enterprise app” vision where data relationships and their impact to the business process matter, and define best practices to ensure “safe” Cloud Computing that drives tangible business IT improvements.”
David promises to be entertaining, and since it’s now 7:00pm, I’m counting on it.
Punch line, turning commodities into utilities.
Cloud computing, culture of enterprise integration, will take a shot at defining cloud computing, then talk about some best practices.
“Integration is hard, by hard, I mean expensive”. Integration is more than getting things to talk, it’s making things work properly. Integration is for infrastructure and data. People understand infrastructure and need to configure. People don’t understand data integration and why it’s so hard.
Data integration is hard. Infrastructure integration, not so hard.
Data integration isn’t just hard, but it’s hard to explain why it’s hard, because it’s invisible. It’s hard to quantify.
With cloud computing, if we can make the easy stuff invisible, hopefully we can spend more time on the hard stuff, and get better at it. Put more discipline around the things that are hard.
If you are in an enterprise and want to deploy cloud computing, or soa, need to build strategy and teach people why that strategy is important.
The whole way we buy software is wrong: all the upfront evaluation, purchases, delivery, configuration etc. Today, all you need to do is get a login. Spend $10/month. You have the freedom to make mistakes, recover financially (the $10), and quickly change directions (get another login).
Data integration is hard. Costs don’t match benefits.
How to make it easier and deliver benefits more quickly? “Cloud computing is a way to make integration easier and deliver benefits more quickly”.
Turn a commodity into a utility. Not everything is going to be a commodity. David calls out Xignite statement, don’t put it in the cloud if it needs to be secure.
Turn integration into a utility. Move work that is necessary but not differentiating.
Commodities according to David: most enterprise software and email.
Messaging, not a commodity. [Of course David is from Progress, which he readily admits] His point is, he wants all his messages in one place. Not, go to Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce etc.
David calls for building of platforms (me too). Let’s spend [IT] time with data models, interfaces, processes on a dynamic infrastructure [that met corporate requirements] & simply existed as needed?
This vision, achieving this vision, results in elevated IT relevance. Computing to solve problems is really interested.
Why can’t we do “cool in the enterprise”. Where cool is at the end-user & application, not in the server room. Need to spend our time better.
Best practices:
- Mediation. A secret weapon. Powerful way to protect yourself from change. Can also track who is doing what to whom. He just used the “G-word” governance.
- Service Level Management. Don’t even start with “my piece is working fine”. Need to abstract SLA up high enough so they make sense to the customer. Not server up time, but application up time.
- Security. It’s not (only) what you think it needs to be. Security needs to move up to the application level.
- Make mistakes. Not 8 year beta, but doesn’t have to be perfect. IT needs to focus on products, not projects. Projects end. Products have long term ownership and management.
- Build a culture of collaboration.
- Map out a strategy. Reward innovation. Reward relevance. Teach people why they are doing something. Let them choose how (within corporate guidelines)
David mentioned a related paper released by Progress today. If I had wifi right now, I’d search for it. Thanks to Emily Estep for supplying the link. [link added on 4.1.2009]
PDF 
