"A standard becomes successful when people don’t talk about it anymore" says OMG's Soley

Posted by Jeevak Kasarkod on Aug 28, 2011

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In an interview with SearchSOA, Richard Soley, CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG), explains the adoption patterns of cloud computing and SOA as an effect of hype cycles . For a major section of the interview he focuses on the financial and technical reasons for why cloud computing is more relevant for startups as compared to larger businesses and the state of cloud standards.

Soley believes that the hype around cloud computing is obscuring its true value just like the roller coaster ride SOA experienced in the last decade. He further states that after the disillusionment at the end of its hype cycle, SOA continues to be adopted by plenty of organizations. He corroborates this fact with the success of OMG's SOA consortium and it's continued work within the OMG's business ecology initiative. Here is his general observation on hype cycles:

If you ask if SOA has become mainstream, the answer is ''yes.'' One of the definitions of whether a standard becomes successful is when people don’t talk about it anymore and they just do it.

On similar lines he hopes that the hype around cloud computing does not affect its reputation as a great idea. However in its current avatar cloud computing has not yet addressed concerns around security, transformation of legacy systems and related interoperability standards to impact large business adoption . On the other hand the opex vs capex discussion makes it a game changer for startups. He says:

Since cloud computing is about moving capital costs to operating costs, it is a major paradigm shift for startups. They can startup, although they are capital poor, with little or no computing equipment. They can buy more access - elastically as they need it - to computing power on a cloud platform as they go.

There is another reason why cloud computing is more of a paradigm shift for startups than for bigger companies. 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.

Apart from the absence of a majority of standards needed in this space to address the technical concerns around managing cloud implementations, no single cloud portability standard has emerged a winner. However the silver lining in his opinion is the creation of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, which is a group of end users, that is responsible for prioritizing and defining requirements for the cloud standard organizations such as OMG, The Open Group, the WWW consortium, IETF and DMTF.

What is your view? Can other hype cycles be compared to or end up being as pronounced as the SOA hype cycle or is it something inherent to the nature of SOA?