In his article, Stephen Swoyer opens a new perspective on Cloud Computing to me. Quoting Stephen Elliot, vice-president of strategy with CA Inc.’s infrastructure management and automation practice, he figures out the importance of the cloud concept for enterprises.

For Elliot, Cloud Computing is basically a conceptual refinement of pervasive virtualization. He argues that the Enterprise Cloud model is an inevitable consequence of pervasive virtualization, a virtualization with a business-centric mindset.

Cloud Computing is is about making the IT accountable for the CIO and CEO, not about virtualizing the IT. Customers will not pay the IT to only host their applications or services. Customers purchase a clearly defined service. Therefore, the Enterprise Cloud should be seen as business-process-as-a-service, not so much as software-as-a-service.

In the business-process-as-a-service model, the value of the Enterprise Cloud can be measured with business metrics. If vendors spotlight the accountability as advantage of this model, the customers would be able to provide a proper calculation of the ROI of adapting Cloud Computing. On that condition Enterprise Clouds would become reality in organizations. As computational costs continue to move downward, the financial ROI of adapting Cloud Computing will become even better in future. It’s just a matter of time before it becomes a norm for organizations to take advantage of the Enterprise Cloud.

Via CloudBzz comes a neat visualization of the attributes of cloud computing as evangelized by Gartner.

The attributes are detailed here as follows:

Service-Based: Consumer concerns are abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces that are well-defined. The interfaces hide the implementation details and enable a completely automated response by the provider of the service to the consumer of the service. The service could be considered “ready to use” or “off the shelf” because the service is designed to serve the specific needs of a set of consumers, and the technologies are tailored to that need rather than the service being tailored to how the technology works. The articulation of the service feature is based on service levels and IT outcomes (availability, response time, performance versus price, and clear and predefined operational processes), rather than technology and its capabilities. In other words, what the service needs to do is more important than how the technologies are used to implement the solution.

Scalable and Elastic: The service can scale capacity up or down as the consumer demands at the speed of full automation (which may be seconds for some services and hours for others). Elasticity is a trait of shared pools of resources. Scalability is a feature of the underlying infrastructure and software platforms. Elasticity is associated with not only scale but also an economic model that enables scaling in both directions in an automated fashion. This means that services scale on demand to add or remove resources as needed.

Shared: Services share a pool of resources to build economies of scale. IT resources are used with maximum efficiency. The underlying infrastructure, software or platforms are shared among the consumers of the service (usually unknown to the consumers). This enables unused resources to serve multiple needs for multiple consumers, all working at the same time.

Metered by Use: Services are tracked with usage metrics to enable multiple payment models. The service provider has a usage accounting model for measuring the use of the services, which could then be used to create different pricing plans and models. These may include pay-as-you go plans, subscriptions, fixed plans and even free plans. The implied payment plans will be based on usage, not on the cost of the equipment. These plans are based on the amount of the service used by the consumers, which may be in terms of hours, data transfers or other use-based attributes delivered.

Uses Internet Technologies: The service is delivered using Internet identifiers, formats and protocols, such as URLs, HTTP, IP and representational state transfer Web-oriented architecture. Many examples of Web technology exist as the foundation for Internet-based services. Google’s Gmail, Amazon.com’s book buying, eBay’s auctions and Lolcats’ picture sharing all exhibit the use of Internet and Web technologies and protocols.

The Open Group, OASIS and OMG have published a concerted document about the open SOA standard landscape and the relation of the myriad of standards in this area.

In their own words the document:

[...] explains and positions architectural standards for SOA reference models and ontologies, reference architectures, maturity models, SOA modeling languages, and open standards work related to the topic of SOA governance. It also outlines the agreement on core SOA and SOA governance concepts.
This document is intended to serve as a guide to the reader to help differentiate and select specifications appropriate to their needs.

Direct link: Navigating the SOA Open Standards Landscape Around Architecture.