Spring has arrived and love might be in the air. At least, that was the message of Paul Krill’s story, “The Cloud-SOA Connection.” Or shall we say love connection? In his story, he quotes industry experts that say that the SOA model supports the cloud’s service deployment. We couldn’t help but think that SOA and cloud computing may be a match made in heaven.

“The cloud serves as a good way to deploy services in an SOA environment, says Sanjiva Weerawarana, CEO of open source SOA software vendor WSO2. He notes that SOA and the cloud support each other, but are not based on the same ideas: ‘Cloud computing is a deployment architecture, not an architectural approach for how [to] architect your enterprise IT [as SOA is].’”

The story reports that there are several other reasons that they work hand in hand: the cloud serves as a way to host services; adopting SOA can prepare for cloud computing by showing what challenges an organization faces; and both the cloud and SOA determine what some of the major reusable components are. This last function is crucial as SOA has limited value unless it captures all of the disparate applications and platforms, according to this Information Management article, “The Business of SOA.”

Generally, SOA requires a huge investment on the part of the companies, and the benefits of overhauling a company’s IT infrastructure are usually reaped only in the long term. And right now in this down economy, the thinking goes, companies are reluctant to take on such massive projects. However the fundamental need still remains that services to be properly deployed are dependent on process definitions. In other words, SOA allows IT assets to be easier consumed by business, but BPM defines the process of consumption.

Gartner has listed cloud computing as one of the top technologies for 2009. Only time will tell if organizations decide to migrate to the SOA in order to fully leverage cloud computing.

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