SOURCE: Midsize Insider
The original aim of service-oriented architecture (SOA) was to prevent vendor monopoly, whether in software or underlying hardware, allowing greater user freedom when choosing applications for various business or personal applications. However, many vendors try to tie users to their products, preventing the mix and match of applications on demand and making it difficult to link to existing legacy applications and platforms.
As reported on ZDNet, Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, believes that current trends contradict the original objectives of SOA and as cloud computing advances, SOA alternatives will become more popular, allowing competition from small and midsize companies and thereby encouraging innovation from entrepreneurs rather than a monopoly from major players in the industry.
He adds, “With distributed-SOA clouds, enterprises could host components of applications in the cloud, use the cloud to add instances of software components to improve performance in periods of critical load, and even fall over to the cloud if internal IT elements fail.” This is certainly an important consideration for midsize companies that host customer or supplier-based applications on their own servers. In the event of a power outage or interruption of service, these crucial applications could switch over to a cloud environment, ensuring that customers and suppliers are unaware of any problems, an obvious advantage for a company’s reputation and sure to inspire customer loyalty. Nolle also indicated that distributed-SOA clouds could host service solutions, whether customer support, after-sales, or social media, driving companies into a new era of intelligent networking where connected devices are increasingly common.
Whether this attractive vision of the cloud occurs remains to be seen but should be considered by developers. For small and midsize companies, the advantages would be enormous and take cloud applications to areas other than data centers, where SaaS and PaaS solutions are based on a rental charge or require specific licensing. Companies would not need to worry about compatibly or interoperability issues as long as APIs are available to plug into existing legacy applications. As the GUI is web-based, the type of connected device, OS version and other considerations could also be ignored.
Innovations in cloud computing would also mean that custom solutions could be utilized according to each company’s requirements. An entire project-driven solution could be implemented using any combination of applications, each of which could be linked to in-house databases and legacy applications. In a situation like this, software and hardware upgrades would no longer be as much of a concern, unlike the current situation where lack of software version support or upgrade paths causes companies to spend unnecessary funds on software licensing and hardware replacement.
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
