Cloud computing bigger deal for startups than enterprises: OMG's Richard Soley

Cloud computing is nice, but startups are seeing most of the benefits from this approach -- not established enterprises.

That's the view of Richard Soley, CEO and chairman of the Object Management Group, expressed in a recent interview with TechTarget's Jack Vaughan and Kaitlin Bunsden.  Soley ought to know something about these paradigm shifts -- he's been leading the distributed-computing and service-orientation game a long time, and was one of the original proponents of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) that arose in 1990s to address integration issues with legacy systems.

Capital-poor startups benefit from the access and elasticity that cloud provides. But for enterprises, there's a different force at work, as Soley put it:

"The issue is the legacy. And it’s not just moving your legacy applications to the cloud - it’s how to integrate what’s running on public cloud with the computing resources that are still in your own shop, either because of the legacy or the security concerns, or you just haven’t had the time to move them. So you have more connections between the cloud implementation and the in-house implementation. There are starting to be available software solutions to help with that move, but we’re not entirely there yet."

There are standards in place helping cloud implementations, but portability between platforms and cloud offerings is still a "non-trivial task." He lauds the standards work of groups such as the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF's) OVF for cloud computing program and the Cloud Standards Customer Council.

The overhyping of cloud these days is the same kind of overhyping seen for service oriented architecture in recent years, Soley adds. SOA is successful and ubiquitous because people aren't talking about it, they're just doing it.