Your Middleware ended up in my Cloud!

I recently spotted a really good question from our friend Miko Matsumura on the eBizQ SOA/Cloud forums: "When will the cloud start creating deep impact in the middleware space and what segments will be affected first? Enterprise-to-cloud integration? Web 2.0 Application Infrastructure? Modern Internet B2B? Supply Chain?"

Here's what I had to say on the topic: To date I think there has been a generalization of Cloud as a deployment alternative for production servers, etc, when at first there are few enterprise-level, middleware-enabled business processes that can realistically survive in a Cloud without having "wires hanging out" - constraints of over-utilized systems that cannot be placed in the Cloud.

The pre-integration Cloud you mention - well, the Dev & Test Cloud is going to be a significant area of growth over the next 5 years. It is hard to develop and deliver apps for the Cloud, when there are so many dependencies not available in the Cloud - mainframes, 3rd party apps like SaaS, systems of record and other over-utilized and pay-per-use assets that Development and Test teams simply can't budget for, since their use is highly variable. We will need to find a way to take our middleware processes, and other external constraints, and make them available for integration purposes in the Cloud.

I've made it one of my little missions to better describe this phenomenon with a series of YouTube "chalk talks" there's a series of 4 videos. (See our Solution page for Dev & Test for all 4 videos on the right...)

There's a reason why current successes in the Cloud are kind of consumer-oriented, content-heavy apps, and not as much "big iron" multi-enterprise apps and middleware. Pre-Production clouds will be a necessity for Cloud Apps.

The fears that Cloud Apps are not bulletproof enough for serious middleware and integration use are unfounded - good software, wherever it is deployed, is still up to people: good architecture, elegant development, responsible security approaches and early testing. If we give them the means to do their jobs better in Cloud pre-production environments the success will follow.