The Rise of the Application
Oracle’s bid for Sun has officially sucked the air out of this week’s news cycles.
And for good reason—it has the potential to truly change the face of the IT landscape, pitting Larry of the Emerald Towers against the stalwart incumbents of the enterprise datacenter. This is a story we’ll all follow closely for some time.
In other news this week, rPath announced its plans to redefine application delivery and systems management. Certainly, I’d be disingenuous to suggest that I’m not at least slightly lamenting the timing of our news, which—while, important—may struggle to rise above the din of the Oracle/Sun announcement.
The “Last Mile” of IT Process Automation
You can roughly approximate the health of the economic climate by a CIO’s list of priorities. In times of prosperity, his or her priorities are optimized for revenue growth. In more challenging times—like today—cost reduction tops the agenda.
Of course, this is no great surprise. This is the pattern we expect with the ebbs and flows of the business cycle. We saw it in 2002 and we’re seeing it again today.
But this time is different. The last recession was characterized by deep wholesale cuts in IT spending—in part, because so many organizations had spent heavily on promises of e-everything during the preceding period of economic expansion.
“SOA is Dead”: Or Are The Rumors Greatly Exaggerated?
If you follow the pulse of the software development community, you’ve heard numerous reports that SOA is officially—stick a fork in it—done.
Perhaps the highest profile obit comes from long-time and well-respected SOA analyst, Anne Thomas Manes. Anne literally wrote the book on SOA and has built a personal brand and cult of personality on its rise—and now its alleged fall.
Does Anne truly believe SOA is dead? I think it’s more likely that she—and others—feel that SOA has wandered off track. “SOA is Dead” is little more than a rhetorical devise to provoke a change in thinking and confront the reality that SOA—in its present incarnation—has dramatically under-delivered on promises.
