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;-)