SOMA and IBM's brave new world
I'm not sure I'd brand a product or service as "SOMA," as this was the drug used to keep the masses calmed and stupified in Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World. But let's begin at the beginning.
Service technology -- from SOA to cloud to IT service management -- promises many "-ilities": greater agility, flexibility, and reusability. Joe McKendrick explores the challenges and opportunities with service orientation, and how to capitalize on these emerging computing philosophies.
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant and speaker specializing in trends and developments shaping the technology industry.
I'm not sure I'd brand a product or service as "SOMA," as this was the drug used to keep the masses calmed and stupified in Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World. But let's begin at the beginning.
The other week, IBM pledged to release 500 technology patents to the development community, for free, with no strings attached. On the surface, at least, the pledge seems like a positive development.
SOA's a hit across the continent, but not in Paris. A survey commissioned by BEA Systems finds widespread adoption plans for SOA in a recent survey of European companies.
The global service economy is in a state of upheaval and transformation. The trends and technologies discussed here in SOA are certainly contributing to this coming shift.
Earlier this month, we talked about IBM's pledge to provide the methods behind 500 of its patents to anyone that wants to use them, at no charge, with no fear of legal repercussions. (My original post about "IBM's patent surprise" is here.
Many organizations have just barely begun to get their feet wet in Web services, and are understandably confused about the SOA phenomenon. So while pundits may be calling 2005 The Year of SOA, let me make this 100% guaranteed, accurate forecast: 2005 will be The Year People Will Be Talking a Lot About SOA.
It seems everybody's starting to get some SOA religion, from Dade County's call center to an Indiana-based cabinetmaker. What really jumps out in a recent article on all these implementations is that Web services/SOA is many things to many people.
British American Tobacco -- which operates in 180 countries and manufactures Dunhill, Pall Mall and Lucky Strike cigarette brands -- is leading the pack in the SOA world. With 64 Enterprise Resource Planning platforms worldwide (with as many as 2,000 applications on some of them), the company was desperate to bring some senseto itsIT infrastructure.
Our fellow ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn picked up on this unusual story about XML Smell, and how it may finally bring some predictions from long ago to reality. The concept of "smellavision," along with a similar concept for movie theaters always seemed like one of those intriguing applications that the Jetsons and other people of the future would enjoy.