What Cloud and SOA Will Bring in 2012: Seven ‘Half-Baked Ideas’

Summary: More Big Data power, more data center power, more user power, more opportunities await organization in the year ahead.

The year 2011 has been an interesting year in terms of SOA-cloud convergence, and the next year will see even more of it. Looking ahead, here are some half-baked ideas — or HBIs — on what appears to developing for the year ahead, and beyond:

1) SOA and cloud will underpin successful Big Data analytics deployments. There’s quite a bit of excitement these days around Big Data, it’s management implications, and the opportunities it presents to organizations hungry for more insights on their customers and markets. This is all part of the continuing rise of the Intelligent Web — SOA, cloud and social media are turning business intelligence into “collaborative intelligence.” But getting there requires managing Big Data applications in a service-oriented way — through strategies such as data virtualization.  “We take the data infrastructure layer, and take data stores like Hadoop, and the existing enterprise systems that give that data valuable context and integrate those at the data layer. We abstract that integrated data platform from the consuming applications via service-oriented data access patterns,” says John Akred, data and platforms lead at Accenture Technology Labs. “We’re exposing our enterprise data platform to the enterprise via services rather than direct query access.”

2) Computing power “too cheap to meter:” thanks to SOA and the cloud, massive data center power is available for literally pennies. This is a good value proposition for companies looking to expand or needing to expand their IT capabilities. Cisco’s latest Global Cloud Index finds that organization’s data centers will be moving to the cloud in a big way.  And, by extension, chances are organizations will be cloud providers as much as cloud vendors. There was a time when launching a serious startup required serious capital for hiring talent, marketing and promotion, office space, and for technology to make it all happen. Thanks to the availability of powerful and low-cost on-demand technologies, innovators now have access to computing and information resources unheard of even a few years ago.

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