Of Clouds, SaaS and SOA – Trends for 2008 and Beyond

Gary Palgon
Vice President, Product Management
nuBridges

Another week, another Gartner conference.  Last week I attended Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit 2008 and it can be summed up as ‘buzz words a plenty!’   Some of the favorites included cloud (variously referred to as ‘the cloud,’  ‘cloud services,’  ‘cloud computing’ and ‘in the cloud’), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) -- among others.   Gone from this year’s presentation titles were EAI, middleware and WOA.

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, recognized that boundaries of businesses are global.  This trend was a clear challenge to IT as “virtual” companies are being composed (largely enabled by technology) of multiple entities each specializing in some unique function, yet they present themselves to the marketplace as an integrated business, aggregating everything from manufacturing to sales.   For example, Threadless.com, a t-shirt manufacturer, relies on consumers (via a social networking community) for t-shirt design, marketing and sales.  eBay provides a technology platform, virtual community, marketing and business facilitation, while consumers provide the goods.

This leads to the need for IT to also begin bridging systems beyond the four walls of their enterprise, linking in ‘services’ from business partners.   For instance, companies like Amazon Web Services (part of Amazon.com) or Force.com (part of SalesForce.com – see http://www.salesforce.com/platform) can provide a hardware grid, system infrastructure and data services, all part of an Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) construct.   Business applications are exposed above that layer ‘in the cloud’ in a multi-tenant environment as part of the Business Platform as a Service construct (BPaaS).   The core business can then focus on the key elements that make up the business and execute as an efficient business ecosystem. In the end, not only is content being aggregated or ‘mashed-up,’ but actually the businesses themselves are mashed up.   Information technologists must understand the underlying business drivers and support these electronic bridges.

And lest we forget security.   With these composite businesses and the composite applications supporting them, the security threats internally and externally also grow.  The Web 2.0 (another buzz word) world, one of openness and collaboration, makes it that much more important to ensure that SaaS and other providers ‘in the cloud’ embed security as part of the applications and services they provide.

Be back next week,
Gary