Defining the Vision

Pulier says to advance the SOA the CIO must collaborate closely with the CEO and the CFO on a general vision for the company that is likely to gravitate around the idea that IT costs are out of control, that the efficiency of the organization is poor, and that strategic business decisions for the company should be based on business activities in the market rather than being based on the "cement" of the underlying IT processes.

"So the CFO can say: 'Look, we can see the savings we are going to get here if we moved to a lot more agile enterprise'. The CEO is going to see the freedom to innovate and to move his or her strategy forward with the market without being told by IT that that is simply not possible. And the CIO is finally going to be able to create a data centre and an organization that operates more like an electrical utility than a series of silos around the world. The model for an electrical utility is really ultimately where all of this goes," Pulier says. "The SOA is really a step on the way to utility computing, where you're rolling out the right resources to the right part of the organization on that basis."

If SOA is one necessary and important step towards utility computing, simultaneous and interrelated advances in other areas are also helping to realize this vision. They include projected massive advances in efficiency. "Over the next five years we can expect to see the efficiency of corporate data centres and servers to move from about 5 percent to closer to 85 percent" Pulier says.

However, the adoption of SOA standards that create an abstraction layer between the application and the consumers of that application to allow for interoperability between these various models will also greatly advance efficiency, Pulier says. For instance it allows applications that used to have to live on the mainframe to be transported to another platform and for all the dependent applications to be able to adapt quickly.

"Everybody's got a different name for it but it's happening very quickly. And I think perhaps the most significant advance in the world of technology, which is enabling this efficiency, is the virtualization technologies that were pioneered by VMware. It has become quite prevalent in terms of R&D in just about every company," he says. "The open source vCapability is now being adopted by companies such as Novell and Red Hat; the virtualization-ready chips coming out of AMD and Intel are all leading towards the same thing, which is more capacity, less hardware, and the ability to run multiple applications over the same old pieces of hardware. The result ends up being a more efficient enterprise," he says.

But SOA also pushes the vision of utility computing along by allowing process efficiency. Having numbers of reusable services that can be assembled into applications or processes ushers in process change. And defining SLAs for those services makes it easy to decide which processes support the corporate vision, and so should be maintained in-house, and which ones should be outsourced and engaged from a third party.

Pulier predicts this trend will create new markets for companies that develop services to be consumed by others. Once that happens, the main goal of many companies will be to figure out how to get customers to integrate with their business processes. The answer will be to become as standards compliant as possible and to make it as easy as possible to appear to be in-house. "That breaks down organizational barriers as well obviously, because your organization is more virtual, including not only your own company but your partner's company as part of your process."

He says to manage the fact that the standards are constantly evolving, many companies are starting to appoint a head of Web services who works under the CIO and participates in the standards bodies and ensures their organization is maintaining compliance with these standards as they evolve.