Phil Wainewright: Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge?

Some really interesting things jumped out in Phil’s post, but what really stood out was the second paragraph.  The insight into the challenges of evolving to a cloud computing mindset is worth at least a few reads, as some of us that live in the Cloud tend to forget the seismic shift in thinking we have to go through when detaching from the ‘enterprise’ model.  One line in particular has me waxing philosophic about why SOA tends to be viewed as a software package or vendor offering rather than as a design principle:

“A constantly recurring theme in the evolution of SOA, cloud and the Web has been the misplaced imposition of trusted, existing structures onto emergent patterns of interaction.”

Specifically, I began to wonder whether SOA is inextricably linked to “web services” software just because  we tend to try to rationalize complex and unknown structures with what we already know and are comfortable with, or if my initial belief that SOA’s adoption (or even understanding for that matter) has been co-opted by traditional software vendors is more defensible.  Or is there really a difference between the two – i.e. are the blind leading the blind?

In any case, SOA and cloud computing are starting to be mentioned in the same breath by many of the visionaries in the space, so it will be interesting to see whether we can drive to a point of widespread mainstream adoption of the view of cloud computing as the technology manifestation of the SOA philosophy, or if the Cloud will also be co-opted by the traditional enterprise players with deep marketing pockets and short-sighted intentions.

Power in the Cloud: Situational Application Resource Center

Our friends at SilverTree Systems have introduced the Situational Application Resource Center, a collection of information that is dedicated to furthering a very compelling cloud computing technology that is being defined as ‘Situational Applications.’

Situational applications are essentially rapidly developed applications that are designed to immediately address a business challenge – i.e. solving a business process inefficiency, extending the functionality of enterprise systems such as CRM or ERP without having to customize the core application, or addressing market and customer opportunities as quickly as possible.  Situational applications also represent an opportunity for ISV’s to develop and market “Long Tail” applications to niche / “micro-vertical” markets that have traditionally been underserved by the broader software industry due to high development costs and prohibitive barriers to entry.  Delivered Innovation partnered with Coghead in early 2008 to take a number of situational applications to market, including the Marketing Lucidity Lead Model and Marketing Budget Management; we are also in the process of delivering the Lead Model and Marketing Budget Management on the Force.com “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS) by Salesforce.com.  These are applications that provide highly specific functions for marketing budget and lead generation planning that would not have been viable just two years ago due to the high costs of developing such applications…costs that would have been passed through to our customers and in turn priced out the very customers we built these applications for.

Cloud computing platforms such as Coghead and Force.com have set in motion a “virtuous cycle” for SaaS applications and situational applications targeted to business users and companies that traditionally would not have been in the market for such applications because of the costs and technology requirements involved.  Because we don’t have to purchase servers, software, and network infrastructure upfront, we can focus our capital on building very specific and highly robust application functionality.  Because the data model, user interface, and business rules / application logic are all provided as standardized components by the PaaS provider, our development time is slashed by almost 75%, which contributes to our ability to rapidly deliver new value to our customers at a significantly reduced price point.  Because our price point is significantly lower than it would be in a traditional ISV model, we can create new markets for our SaaS applications.  When customers are introduced to the concepts of cloud computing, SaaS, and situational applications, they in turn find innovative new ways to apply the technologies to their businesses, creating value far beyond what we had originally envisioned.  And the customers that understand the game-changing implications of these new technologies want to build new situational applications to accelerate improvement and growth in other areas of their businesses.  All of a sudden, we’re looking at the potential of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) being fully realized, and companies are applying a building-block philosophy to technology and business processes.  It’s beautiful.

Please visit the Situational Application Resource Center today to contribute to the movement and find ways to deliver value to your customers and the community.