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Once in a while, a confluence of random events (or not so random, depending on your belief system) can create the ideal aha! moment. The moment of clarity when all the pieces just fall into place and you realize "that's what's going on!" I believe I have had one of those moments. And if this thought has any basis in reality, it could mean that everything we have seen in IT is about to make a huge change.

Cloud providers and mainstay enterprise software vendors could make sweeter WOA plus SOA music together. They may not have a choice. If Microsoft acquires Yahoo!, there will be a huge push for Microsoft Oriented Architecture that will double-down on “software plus services.” And MSFT combined with Yahoo would have an awful lot in place to work from — from the device and PC client, to the server farm, business applications, developer tools and communities, and ramp-up of global cloud/content/user metadata resources. I think Microsoft already understands the power of WOA plus SOA.

The cloud that can manage data in way that allows both user-level and process-level access, with granular permissioning — and allows CXOs to feel good about it all — gets the gold ring. The cloud business is a 50-year business.

It’ll be cheaper to put apps in the cloud than to run them on your own servers: “It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom … Somebody who is selling [business] apps is going to build in, more than likely, the underlying utility costs within their higher-level service. It will still be cheaper to do those things on a service infrastructure than it is on a server infrastructure.” Taken together, these statements — by the company’s chief strategy officer, no less — add up to a huge strategic shift under way within Microsoft. They suggest that, in five years’ time, the company will be unrecognizable compared to today, with services revenues taking a significant share while licence revenues dwindle.

Instead of seeing the Web as an extension of the desktop, it includes the desktop as part of the continuum of the Web. Where then does the application sit? Not on the desktop, or on any identifiable server machine, but simply in the mesh. In other words, it becomes a service, capable of running anywhere in the cloud, including on the desktop.

“haven’t we seen some of this before? A service which offers both synchronization and replication? Remember Lotus Notes and Groove? … Ray Ozzie was the creative force behind Notes, Groove, and now, Live Mesh.”

Microsoft is investing some of the top engineering talent at the company to make two key investments: Deliver a world class SOA platform across client, server, and cloud. Microsoft has been a thought leader in Web services and SOA technologies since the very beginning and has delivered industry leading technologies such as the Windows Communication Foundation and BizTalk Server. Deliver a world class and mainstream modeling platform that helps the roles of IT collaborate and enables better integration between IT and the business. The modeling platform enables higher level descriptions, so called declarative descriptions, of the application.

Brewin define the composition of Project Hydrazine as "...a network environment, a data center and other infrastructure components such as Sun's JavaFX rich Internet application technology, Sun's GlassFish application server, the Sun enterprise service bus, the Sun directory server, MySQL, 'cheap storage' and Sun hardware." In addition, two repositories will be part of the package. These will enable the storage of services that run on the cloud and of metadata to be used and reused in creating applications. Furthermore, Sun will include Project Insight, an analytics capability, that will enable developers to monitor the users of their projects and to monetize them, according to Brewin.

Taft sees Project Hydrazine as pitting Sun against Microsoft's Live Mesh strategy, another cloud computing and sync mechanism solution, as well as in the areas of developer and design tools space and in the concept of developer-designer workflow. Brewin sees the JavaFX Transformer technology as having a significant role in this area. Java FX Script will do for the Sun solution what XAML does for Microsoft's product.

Brewin added that Project Hydrazine would also support such clouds as Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and services from such vendors as eBay and PayPal. Sun plans to deliver an early access release of its JavaFX SDK (software development kit) in July, Taft concludes.

So, true, WOA, isn’t an architecture, it’s a webby style of apps and integration, of mashups and open APIs, of using REST and RIA clients, all from a variety of Internet sources. It’s integration as a service, too. These can all be composited, accessed and managed by an enterprise’s internal SOA, or not. The services can come from a cloud, public or private. Forrester says the growth curve for Enterprise 2.0 is steep, but I think it will be even steeper. These webby assets could just as well come together as portals, standalone Web apps, SaaS, or RIA front ends for composited ecology services that support extended enterprise processes. The point is there’s no need to wait.

rapid ramp-up of services hybrids — of public/private clouds, services ecologies, internal and external hosting, social enterprise media tools, mashups in myriad forms, integration of services regardless of origins or types of aggregation. You can today begin a business online and scale it without an IT department, or an on-premises datacenter. You just can.

The fact is that the definitions of and distinctions between applications, platforms, services, tools, clouds, portals, integration, middleware are — all up for grabs. IT as a concept is up for grabs. The shifts in the software arena at that disruptive. It’s why Microsoft is seeking to buy Yahoo, and not Oracle.

Live Mesh brings that to life, as product director Mike Zintel explains on the brand new Live Mesh blog: “[It] blend[s] the web, Windows and other computing endpoints in a way that preserves the ‘it just works’ feel of the web with seamless integration into my common workflows. The coolest thing about Live Mesh is how it smashes the abrupt mental switch that I have to make today as I move between being ‘on the web’ and ‘in an application’.” At first glance, that may seem a perfectly reasonable and innocuous statement — and indeed it is, if you take a Web-centric view of the world — but coming out of Microsoft, it’s dynamite. Instead of seeing the Web as an extension of the desktop, it includes the desktop as part of the continuum of the Web. Where then does the application sit? Not on the desktop, or on any identifiable server machine, but simply in the mesh. In other words, it becomes a service, capable of running anywhere in the cloud, including on the desktop.

“The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations) …” “At the core of Mesh is [the] concept of a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses.

TCG Advisors envisions a new computing model for when the inter-enterprise becomes the basis of all IT infrastructure. Where can we expect the most change? All the action is going to be in the middle [layer] in preparation for a significant change at the top in about five years. We are all [preparing] for a new business model: the inter-enterprise network value chain. For the inter-enterprise network value chain, traditional business applications need to be re-architected so they can cross company boundaries. When people look at this re-architecting, they see two huge barriers: the middleware, because our software doesn't work this way, and the business process layer, because people don't have a lot of experience [with it]. There will be a fair amount of trial and error before we figure this out. Even thought leaders are struggling.

The goal has been managing information. We're shifting from managing information to managing processes. Information is an important attribute in process management, but it's not the goal. So trying to turn data into information is the wrong way to look at the problem. What we are trying now is to manage processes across multiple states, where any portion of the process can be in multiple states. So you have to keep state - which is a computing idea - and you have to coordinate actions among self-managing logic. That's the service-oriented architecture paradigm.

What service-oriented architectures let you do is recombine - they are like Legos - to make all kinds of innovations out of the existing components of the world. This is very productive. If you're stuck in a client/server system you can't participate in that.

OM MALIK: You outlined Microsoft’s software-plus-services strategy, but what I want to know about is the changing role of the desktop in this service’s future. RAY OZZIE: I think the real question is (that) if you were going to design an OS today, what would it look like? The OS that we’re using today is kind of in the model of a ’70s or ’80s vintage workstation. It was designed for a LAN, it’s got this great display, and a mouse, and all this stuff, but it’s not inherently designed for the Internet. The Internet is this resource in the back end that you can design things to take advantage of. You can use it to synchronize stuff, and communicate stuff amongst these devices at the edge. A student today or a web startup, they don’t actually start at the desktop. They start at the web, they start building web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?

Experience datacenter availability Excel That Scales offers greater resiliency and reliability over desktop-based solutions. GigaSpaces IMDG instances are replicated such that every partition has one or more backups, and these backups do not reside on the same physical server as the primary partition. If a system fails, the processing logic can be transparently routed to an identical instance on the backup partition without experiencing an interruption in service. Furthermore, the GigaSpaces technology provides a self-healing environment. When the primary partition fails, the backup becomes the primary partition, and another identical partition instance is automatically spawned, thus helping to ensure that a backup is always available. Excel That Scales is unique in that it co-locates logic and data in the same process. Excel decouples the computational logic from the presentation layer and GigaSpaces completes the solution by recoupling the logic with the associated data and executing them in the same process.

Unlike some architectures that increase in complexity as they scale, GigaSpaces, running on Sun platforms, delivers limitless scalability and low-latency performance for highly demanding applications and environments. Excel That Scales is optimized to run on the Solaris 10 OS and benefits from its innovative virtualization technology. The combination of GigaSpaces and Solaris OS helps financial firms cope with the exponential growth of market data and transaction volumes by providing the ability to run separate Excel-based applications in individual Solaris Containers. This integration of technologies enables IT managers to reap the benefits of virtualization while helping to manage growth and control complexity.

Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows. Google’s answer for now is no. There’s no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.

We're going to talk about dynamic documents. That is to say, documents that have form and structure and that are things end-users are very familiar with and have been using for generations, but with a twist. That's the ability to bring content and data, on a dynamic lifecycle basis, in and out of these documents in a managed way. That’s one area.The second area is service-oriented architecture (SOA), the means to automate and reuse assets across multiple application sets and data sets in a large complex organization.We're seeing these two areas come together. Structured documents and the lifecycle around structured authoring tools come together to provide an end-point for the assets and resources managed through an SOA, but also providing a two-way street, where the information and data that comes in through end-users can be reused back in the SOA to combine with other assets for business process benefits.

Thus far we’ve been talking about the notion of unstructured content as a target source to SOA-based applications, but you can also think about this from the perspective of the end application itself -- the document as the endpoint, providing a framework for bringing together structured data, transactional data, relational data, as well as unstructured content, into a single document that comes to life.Let me back up and give you a little context on this. You mentioned the various documents that line workers, for example, need to utilize and consume as the basis for their jobs. Documents have unique value. Documents are portable. You can download a document locally, attach it to an email, associate it with a workflow, and share it into a team room. Documents are persistent. They exist over a period of time, and they provide very rich context. They're how you bring together disparate pieces of information into a cohesive context that people can understand.

Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.

“Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent. A given application can use different data. An application can run on a desktop or in my browser, it’s my agent. It can access all the data, which I can use and everything’s much more seamless and much more powerful because you get this integration. The same application has access to data from all over the place.”

simply: Microsoft is launching a synchronization platform that the company claims is technology-agnostic. That absolutely is not true. Live Mesh is Microsoft's attempt to turn operating system and proprietary services platforms into hubs that replace the Web. It's the most anti-Web 2.0 technology yet released by any company. Microsoft is building a services-based operating system that transcends and extends Windows and also the function of Web browsers. It's bold, brilliant and downright scary. Microsoft has identified the right problem, synchronization, but applied a self-serving solution.

The services platform doesn't seek to keep the Web as the hub, but replace it with something else. The white paper is wonderfully misleading, by implying that Microsoft supports the Web as the hub. Live Mesh is the hub.

Live Mesh is competitively important to Microsoft because of companies like Google, whose services shift computational and informational relevancy from desktop software to the Web. But there is something missing as data spreads out across the Web platform to millions of devices: simple synchronization.