Listen to my Podcast on Government Clouds and SOA

My first Podcast ever... You can listen to it at the following link:

Government Cloud Is Where the Action Is: Talking With Tarak Modi

Feel free to send comments. I look forward to your feedback and suggestions for future podcasts.

Is Multitenancy a Prerequisite for Cloud Computing?

There is interesting and ongoing debate among cloud gurus over whether multitenancy is a prerequisite for cloud computing. Well, the debate has now made its way on the Cloud Computing forum on ebizQ. And I just had to respond with my 2 cents...

I think the answer varies by perspective. For example,

1. The cloud provider would want to maximize multi-tenancy to realize economies of scale and maximize revenue from a fixed set of assets (hardware, software, infrastructure, etc.)


2. The cautious consumer would like to minimize multi-tenancy with the most obvious reasons being security, privacy, and performance.


3. Vendors who make money from selling on premise software and hardware would like to minimize multi-tenancy to preserve their revenue streams.

Hmmmmm... I think my answer boils down to "It depends."

* Originally posted on the ebizQ Cloud Computing forum on March 9, 2010.

The Future of Desktops

Another interesting discussion on ebizQ today about a recent statement by Google's European director of online sales, John Herlihy, who said that in three years time the desktop will be irrelevant.

Ok, it sounds good and is memorable. But just how true is this statement?

I basically agreed with Nari Kannan's point of view.

Mainframes were supposed to be obsolete a long time ago. But in fact, according to Gartner, the mainframe has gained 16 percent of market share in the high-end server category since 2001. IBM seems to believe this since it unveiled the z9 in the 2005, following a three-year, $1.2 billion development project and the z10 in 2008, which it spent $1.5 billion and five years developing.

Last year we heard the proclamation that "SOA is dead." The fact is, however, that with the Cloud Computing boom, SOA is picking up even more steam as applications either migrate or get built for the cloud.

Sometimes I wonder if declaring a technology dead has the reverse effect on it. In that case, if Google really wants desktops gone, declaring them irrelevant may not be the best strategy after all. :)

* Originally posted in the ebizQ Friday Forum on March 5, 2010

Is SOA focussing on the wrong layer in the Enterprise?

The question that came up on the ebizQ SOA forum today is "Are Current SOA Efforts Too Focused on Applications, Versus Data Integration Requirements?"

ebizQ's Joe McKendrick further explains his question - "An SOA Data Integration Architecture Community has just been launched. Are current SOA efforts too focused on applications, versus data integration requirements? If so, how can these two disciplines be brought together?"

A very interesting and thought provoking question indeed.

I would contend that applications are the gateway to data and a defense-in-depth mechanism/control to enforce business and security related rules to ensure the appropriate use and manipulation of data. If one accepts that premise then it implies that application integration is data integration and therefore, SOA is focussed at the proper layer (i.e. applications) in the enterprise architecture.

That does not mean direct data integration never occurs. Data Warehouses are an example of where this does happen since these are created by integrating, combining, and denormalzing data from many different sources.

* Originally posted on the ebizQ SOA Forum on March 4, 2010