Chuck Norris and The Cloud?

[Latest News Headlines]

“The only thing that Chuck Norris cannot kill is The Cloud”


So opened the Oracle sponsored Enterprise Architecture Cloud Computing Roundtable in a sweltering San Francisco. Architects from famous SaaS/PaaS/IaaS providers, as well as architects from large corporations arrived for the SmackDown of the century.

The audience concluded that “Integration” and “Security” were the most pressing areas for architectural patterns. The location/selection, rating and integration of Cloud based business services dominated the conversation. The SaaS vendors pushed for a standard simplified business model for defined business flows such as hire-to-fire, but some customers (especially one from Fin Serv) talked about having 5000+ business processes. How do you simplify that? Their business model required the focused servicing of their clients and they were loath to simplify their “secret sauce”. Herein lies the rub, how do you easily take a SaaS based offering and integrate it, with not only your own backend business flows but also those chosen business services on the Cloud? SOA and BPEL? Cloud based enterprise service bus? I hope there are startups and large corporations ready to deliver click based simplification to this complex task…. okay maybe not..

Standards, common APIs and focused brain power are needed if this is going to get solved before I'm rich and famous!

Authentication and Cloud based IdM produced a similar meeting of minds but there was a well known telecoms provider who professed to have solved this issue and was preparing to introduce services that solved this very problem. That produced quite an excited stir of the architects. Getting your data into and out of the Cloud produced some amusing discussions around exactly where and what would be transferred when. When your IaaS Cloud provider is toast, do you get a disk in the mail for example?

The attendees mostly focused on SaaS but there were some good discussions around Private Cloud. The ability to provide low cost IaaS internally to your business owners could provide some customers with a real avenue to dramatically reduce IT costs. Politically this might be a real sticking point, as you need each LOBs to release it’s vise-grip upon it’s own IT budget, IT staff or equipment (some customers have IT staff reporting directly to the LOBs). That takes very strong leadership; someone in the organization who is prepared to step up and change the old inefficient patterns for greater gain.

Architects and enterprise architecture is at the heart of real business gain. Ultimately technology is just solving a business problem.

I’m looking forward to the New York event tomorrow, but right now my immediate priority is to get out of the Oracle Madison office and find somewhere decent to eat in New York… hmmm there’s an app for that… if only the Cloud was so easy to use too!



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