Motley Fool - Don't trust the cloud (yet)

Motley Fool has a spot-on article regarding the business and investing side of cloud computing. First, Motley states the recent outages from Google, Apple (.me), and Amazon (two hour cloud outage) shows businesses should not be running their business on the Internet quite yet. That is obvious. Much more importantly, Motley Fool also calls you "crazy" if you're not betting on the cloud as an investor. The reason? Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all working to offer offline access to their online data. Google is working on this with Gears while Adobe is working on this with the AIR runtime. Microsoft, of course, has Silverlight.

SOA = "You're Fired" ?

A lot of press currently about the failure rate of SOA. Here's another article, asking if SOA = "You're Fired" to CIOs. KPI stresses to our customers that SOA can give you a competitive advantage, however, you that you will bleed money if you do not understand that SOA is a paradigm shift for most organizations. If you are looking for a model to follow, look no further than Amazon.

Only 20% of SOA succeeding, but how to do it

Probably half of IT projects fail. This study shows 80% of SOA projects failing. But the article does give common threads among the initiatives that have succeeded. KPI's experience is that C-level buy-in and a cultural shift are necessary for any SOA initiative to succeed (and that often comes with a change of CTO or a visionary one already in place).

Defect costs rises, SOA blamed

Article on ZDNet about SOA increasing the cost of defects. McKendrick is completely wrong when he says the purpose of SOA is to "simplify things". The purposes of SOA are integration, interoperability, and a competitive advantage in acquisitions. SOA, of course, introduces new methodologies and new products into the organization. This will in turn increase the number of errors. Process is essential to SOA -- the earlier you find a defect, the cheaper it costs to fix.

"Cloud computing" -- meaningless jargon

Analysts and non-technical tech writers are using the term "cloud computing" with increasing frequency. Cloud computing means too many things. In most cases, analysts simply are clueless when throwing out the term. Here is an article that attempts to define three types of "cloud computing".

Lack of process killing SOA efforts

At Network World, a panel conclusively agreed that SOA efforts are failing due to lack of process. SOA is a new way of developing software and your process must reflect that. Otherwise, your project's cost will rise uncontrollably due to re-engineering efforts, something KPI has seen.

Yahoo! search goes SOA

Yahoo! is taking their search SOA according to this article. This is a good move by Yahoo! Amazon's web services have been hugely successful. From Yahoo!'s business perspective, anything to retain or increase market share is a good thing.