Is SOA the Foundation of a Private Cloud?

An interesting question posed by ebizQ's Joe McKendrick today on the SOA forum. His premise is that the purpose of SOA is to enable delivery and reuse of services across the enterprise, which are made available to end-user departments via a directory or registry/repository meshes with the concept of private cloud. Therefore, if you are building an SOA-based infrastructure, are you not also building a private cloud?

I think the question has been artificially constricted in that it should not be limited to the "private" cloud but ALL clouds in general.

In terms of the relationship between SOA and Clouds, I see them as complementary, convergent, and as essential constituents of a larger ecosystem. This is exactly what I talked about in my article titled The Cloud SOA Ecosystem on ebizQ back in October of 2009.

A few excerpts follow:

"The convergence of the cloud and SOA was bound to happen. Several independent events have led up to this perfect union. First, the emergence of the cloud as a viable business and innovation platform that is evident from the sheer number of vendors proclaiming "cloud" products and services and the wide scale adoption of the cloud by many Fortune 500 companies and even the U.S. Federal government. Second, the economic downturn has brought cost cutting initiatives, frugality, and operational efficiency back in fashion. Third, SOA, although undoubtedly a superior architectural style, has struggled to remain mainstream in the eyes of the business beyond the notion of "improving reusability" -- so much so that many technology pundits were even questioning whether SOA was dead!...

...As if the above events were not enough to bring them together, SOA and the cloud have a shared objective: improving the alignment of IT and business with the goal of justifying current and future IT investments, improving IT responsiveness to business change, and increasing operational efficiency. Both the cloud and SOA move the IT function beyond managing applications and infrastructure into a partnership with the business to provide agile solutions to solve dynamic business problems.

The convergence of the cloud and SOA goes beyond just simple alignment of common needs or shared objectives. It is a true symbiotic relationship where SOA fulfills the basic need of the cloud of an application architecture that aligns with and can support its own virtualized, multi-tenant, elastic being.”

Now, how about adding BPM to the mix?

* Originally posted on the ebizQ SOA forum on April 8, 2010