Architecting the Service Oriented Data Center

The adoption of SOA in business computing environments is growing due to the promise of significant cost reduction in the planning, deployment and operation of IT projects. However, the organic transformation from legacy enterprise applications to SOA applications only has been seen mostly in large enterprises datacenter where services are centralized. This paper discusses the effect of SOA, and specifically the effect of Outside-In SOA previously defined in the increasingly decentralized way in which data centers are deployed and managed. Patterns of adoption of SOA, in combination with emerging technologies lead us to believe that the traditional datacenter owned by a large organization, i.e., the traditional monolithic data center, will evolve into a more federated form, with horizontal specialization creating opportunities for smaller players and emerging economies. The decentralization of the physical datacenter will take place through federated services offered from distributed service providers. This new dynamic will affect large and small business alike.