This week in links - week 22, 2008

"SOA marches on despite U.S. economic troubles, analysts" from ZapThink:

Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., argues that whatever is happening with the economy it is a mistake to scale back on SOA. "Companies who have been struggling with SOA -- either in the planning or deployment stages -- are at risk of canceling or scaling back their initiatives to their peril," Bloomberg said. "After all, SOA offers cost savings and agility, two essential benefits in good times and bad. What smart organizations are doing is taking a more focused approach to their SOA initiatives, driving toward key business benefits with more rapid, less expensive iterations that show value quickly."

"How SOA and IT are faring in the ‘unrecession’" by Joe McKendrick:

...there has been no apparent impact or downturn in support for SOA projects and initiatives. And we also generally agreed that any rise or fall in SOA’s fortunes will happen regardless of how well or how lousy the economy is doing. But it may be in many organizations’ best interests to look into service orienting.

"Cloud Computing and Content Management" by Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analyst at CMS Watch:

If there is a buzz around Web 2.0 in the Content Technology community, then there is a roar in the wider IT community around Cloud Computing...//...In fact Cloud Computing simply means moving things to big and bigger Data Centers. Data Centers are anything but fluffy. They are huge, energy-sucking giants -- many the size of small towns. They are environmental disasters and the only thing fluffy about them is the C02 emissions they belch out. Data Centers will in time according to The Uptime Institute become bigger polluters than the aviation industry. Data Centers require massive amounts of energy to operate -- often as much energy is used to cool the centers as to power them. All that heat has to go somewhere. If you think your air conditioning unit is an ecological no-no, then consider the AC demands on a data center the size of 5 football fields, then consider further that according to market research firm IDC, there are over 7,000 major data centers worldwide, and many more in the process of being built. By the way, just because they are big does not make them efficient; it is estimated that around 1/3rd of Data Center servers continually sit idle.

"Study Points to Enterprise 2.0 Perplexity" by Lauren McKay at destinationCRM.com:

Despite steady growth forecasted for Enterprise 2.0, recent research by content management association AIIM demonstrates that organizations are unclear of exactly how to make the best of the Enterprise 2.0 market.

AIIM, which recently introduced an Enterprise 2.0 training program, defines Enterprise 2.0 as: "A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise."

Respondents seem to agree on the goals for Enterprise 2.0, despite not really knowing how to deliver them. Sixty-nine percent of respondents say they wish to use Enterprise 2.0 to increase collaboration. However, they are not clear on which business processes to enhance collaboration.