Reflections on the cloud

The cloud is an interesting phenomenon, to say the least. Just last week, I witnessed a demo by Adrian Colyer at the What's Next (Paris) event that left me very impressed because I could easily understand the problems that it solves:

• Slow infrastructure setup is replaced by instant availability of resources (databases, hardware)
• Scalability is trivially easy: on command is all it takes
• Services are promoted as the means of reuse - effectively enabling SOA strategies

I know from experience that these are all pain points in today's IT infrastructure for just about every big organization. So for mainstream operations, I think the cloud is going to be a killer.

While this is all fine, I still wonder how this will work out for one of our core markets: finance. Sure enough, initial offerings are showing up, but so far nothing really interesting for our retail banking audience. Add to this the fact that most banks are typically very conservative (they have to be) and the cloud for the banking world seems a bit more of a future situation than for the rest of the industry.

But certainly that time will come too, and for those days Atomikos has the exact kind of technology for cloud-enabling transaction guarantees that banks depend on so much. That is because we offer the third generation of TP monitoring technology: light-weight, embeddable, perfectly scalable and SOA capable too.

The future is bright;-)