Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

My wife sat next to my 9 year old daughter sharing a moment of watching a video on Youtube. My daughter watched, came to a part that she didn't enjoy as much and slid the play-slider up to another part. My wife responded by saying "that's really annoying, you learned that from your older sister." I paused her and explained that for my daughter, media is an on-demand experience. Pick what you want, watch it, skip parts you don't want, rewatch parts you particularly enjoy, and share it with friends & family with a click. Whereas my and my wife's experience is broadcast media. You watch (or listen) to what comes on, watch it from beginning to end, and if you missed it - oh well. We don't interact with or adjust our watching experience - she does. (I've actually been in the car with the radio on and had my children say "could you pause it and put that back, I didn't catch what he said".) Clearly for those in the media business this poses ...

Dr. Jimmy Schwarzkopf (IT analyst) wrote... Today I visited a client whose IT budget is no more than 1.6% of its revenues. His boss asked him to cut 20% of the capital investment and 10% of the operational budget (a total of 10% compared to budget 2008). In order to do this the company will stop projects that could have increased revenues, some that could reduce costs and some cuts would increase the risk of IT failures. Now my thoughts: By cutting 0.16% of revenues (as expenses) the company lost much more. Does it make sense to cut IT without a real analysis??? Clearly this company has designated IT as a pure expense center and utility service provider. As far as the business management is concerned, IT is no different than: Facilities Management - Tell them to cut and they can eliminate the office plants and cut back on window cleaning. Cleaning Service - Tell them to cut back and have a somewhat less clean office. Security Service - Lock a few more doors inconveniencing how peopl...

While IT analysts and pundits are busy declaring SOA is dead, SOA has failed, and the downturn killed SOA, the hype of 2009 is Cloud Computing and the resurgence of Software as a Service (SaaS). ( Microsoft Azure being a prime example.) In my discussions with my corporate clients, as well as from my own extensive corporate history, I'm finding that allowing key corporate data and processes to leave the walls of the company controlled data center is the main mental barrier to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Even though companies are outsourcing business processes and the associated data that goes with them - as well as outsourcing some applications to hosting providers - the thought of deploying their applications to an amorphous cloud and depending upon the vendor to just "support and provision it appropriately" is a mental leap they're not yet prepared to make. Similarly, relying upon services that a vendor will just "support and provision appropriately" is a...

The article of the year is from Ann Thomas Manes at The Burton Group: SOA is Dead, Long Live Services. Nothing like a provacative title to get your attention. SOA from a vendor perspective is whatever tool they are selling in the space: ESB, Design Time Governance, Runtime Governance, Policy Management, Registry & Repository, etc. What they always sell is the tool, never the process. Since the A in SOA is Architecture, and the true value of SOA is SOA for the Enterprise (as opposed to SOA for Integration ), it takes implementation of a SOA architecture pattern to get the hyped SOA benefits. But as noted above, this is not what vendors are selling. As most organizations focus on SOA for Integration and layer on a few tools rather than applying architecture and an organizational change process (which, face it, is hard), only incremental benefits will be gained. This is not a surprise, IT managers are rarely rewarded for shaking things up and taking risks. Much of SOA is about c...