Jake Sorofman

Enterprise IT organizations are in the midst of deep and lasting change. IT used to be your cable company: It held the local monopoly for IT services. The wait you experienced was a frustrating, but necessary part of your relationship with enterprise IT. You had no choice. But with the rise of public cloud services like Amazon EC2, business lines now have a choice. Why wait months when minutes will do? That question will ultimately cause application owners to vote with their feet, as demand follows the path of least resistance to the public cloud. That is, unless IT leaders can transform service delivery models to match the flexibility and performance public cloud services provide. "If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." That's Jack Welch offering what may be the most urgent words for today's IT leaders who a... (more)

Recession-Proofing IT via Virtualization and Cloud Computing

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 ... (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 imperative for SOA projects today. This session will discuss the requirements for governing an SOA and the importance of a governance foundation for optimizing the value and mitigating the risks of a ... (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.  The domains of documents and data have long been two worlds divided. Data is stored in relational databases, mainframe systems, and data warehouses. Documents are kept in content management syst... (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 would argue that there are important lessons to be learned from this and any recession. Nobody enjoys a down economy, but it may be comforting to remember that recession is a natural part of the bu... (more)