SOA soon part of the 'cloud'? Hold that thought

There has been a fair share of speculation that SOA will blend in one form or another into Web Oriented Architecture or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in the foreseeable future, and this discussion has appeared frequently on this blogsite. (A discussion on SOA and WOA posted here. I also posted an account here in which a CIO predicts SOA will "fade" into SaaS)

At least one industry leader, however, says 'hold that thought' for now.

For one, iTKO LISA's Jason English says testing and validation -- which enterprises are finally starting to get a handle on in SOA -- is still immature in the cloud space. "Continuous testing and validation of all these combined data sources from the cloud mitigates the risk of invalid data getting mashed up in your workflows, and your business rules going off track." This is a major constraint to consideration of basing services in the cloud.

As cloud computing matures (IBM, for one, is making a huge push for it, other major vendors such as Oracle, Citrix and Intel are also getting cloud religion), these issues will get sorted out. Ultimately, the mission of SOA may be to support a "private cloud" that provides on-demand services through the enterprise and its extended network.  This is where SOA and cloud/SaaS meet.

My ZDNet colleague Dana Gardner recently posted a very good analysis of some of the industry opportunities and challenges around cloud computing implementations. He talks about the need to define the boundary "between the legacy systems, SOAs, business applications and middleware -- and the private cloud fabrics that will increasingly be where new applications/services are 'natively' deployed, and where the integrations to the old stuff occurs." This means "two kinds of clouds -- one for IT and one for consumers," Dana points out.