Jake Sorofman

Recessions are about as appealing as a root canal; but they do force us to think differently. Now that the recession is official, it's an ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help "recession-proof" IT by transforming yesterday’s costly and rigid computing model to one that puts costs under control and sets applications free. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently declared that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. The news would be darkly amusing if it weren’t so utterly painful. But now that the recession is official, this seemed to be the ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help recession-proof IT. Consider the following four tips: 1. Virtualize infrastructure to increase capacity util... (more)

The “Last Mile” of IT Process Automation

You can roughly approximate the health of the economic climate by a CIO's list of priorities. In times of prosperity, his or her priorities are optimized for revenue growth. In more challenging times-like today-cost reduction tops the agenda. Of course, this is no great surprise. This is the pattern we expect with the ebbs and flows of the business cycle. We saw it in 2002, and we're seein... (more)

SOA Governance and Management Issues

In today's business environment, change is the only constant, which makes speed and agility a key basis for competitive advantage. This is why so many organizations are moving toward services oriented architectures as the new basis for IT. But despite the considerable promise of SOA, it adds new complexity that can introduce IT and business risk. This is why governance has become an impe... (more)

Recessionary Recitations: Reducing the Cost and Complexity of Application Delivery

Let's face it - 2008 was a real slog. Even the most wide-eyed optimist would agree that this was one year whose end was long overdue. Of course, ringing in the New Year doesn't somehow wash away what has become a fairly deep recession, but it does symbolize the fresh start that I think we're all looking for right about now. Doom and gloom may be the currency of trade these days, but I wou... (more)

SOA's Second Act: Dynamic Documents Top the Agenda

While SOA has traditionally had something of a data obsession. While the focus has been on service-enablement of structured and transactional data and processes, documents and document-centric processes have been conspicuously absent from the SOA agenda. With structured data in order, organizations are now beginning to take a closer look at the role of unstructured assets as part of SOA.... (more)