Bladewatch.com

http://www.information-age.com/article/2008/January_2008/the_new_architecture

In recent years, ‘agility’ has been a watchword for the forward-looking CIO. Almost every manager in IT has, at some point, had to explain to a business manager why the systems they have expensively installed will limit, rather than open up, new opportunities. And almost every CEO has, at some point, been forced to delay a new business venture while new IT systems are introduced, tested and scaled up.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) forms a large part of the IT industry’s long-running, in-depth, and much-vaunted response to this. Applications have been recast as services, which can be plugged in and interleaved to create powerful new capabilities and automated processes without redesigning or destabilising the entire software applications stack.

But SOA alone is just the most visible part of the story. Flexible applications need to be supported by an underlying, flexible platform – a fabric of intelligently-controlled computing devices that can be managed, or renewed, or extended as the applications demand. In the past, this was crudely known as the hardware layer, but today, with its responsive network of tightly-managed servers, storage and network devices, it is being called a ‘service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) or a real-time infrastructure (RTI).

Check out this interesting article about agility and SOA, it was an interesting read raising relevant comments about on demand infrastructure.

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