Appistry and Consulting Firm AgilePath Team Up to Extend SOA Management to Cloud Environments

Appistry, a cloud computing vendor, announced a new partnership with AgilePath, an SOA management consulting firm. The partnership will enable joint customers to leverage SOA investments and transition to cloud computing via a cloud computing modeling framework.

Through their partnership, AgilePath and Appistry intend to help customers develop a Cloud Computing Modeling framework that applies cloud computing patterns, best practices and technologies to drive business value and enhance SOA initiatives, while reducing deployment and operational costs. The partnership will also assist in the planning, deployment and management of a variety of service-oriented applications within private or hybrid cloud environments.

As part of this partnership, Appistry and AgilePath are co-authoring a book about cloud computing entitled the Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, due for publication in the Fall of 2009. The book will be focused on strategies and trends in enterprise cloud computing.

"Appistry and AgilePath combine best of breed capabilities around SOA and Cloud Computing to provide clients a rapid, governed transition from SOA into Cloud,” said Eric Marks, CEO of AgilePath. "Leveraging AgilePath’s SOA Governance Playbook, a joint Cloud Modeling Framework, and Appistry's CloudIQ Platform, allows enterprises and government agencies to finally leverage tools and processes for governance in the cloud, a capability that has not been available until now."

The promise of SOA is business agility realized through the composition of business applications and business processes based on services that can be reused and recombined to support new business requirements. One SOA challenge comes in forecasting service demand, anticipating the consumer deployment scenarios, and matching service capacity to these unknowns. With traditional approaches, there are the drawbacks of over-provisioning or, on the flip side, failure to scale services to consumer demand. Cloud computing provides a powerful new model for deploying service oriented applications that can span the range of potential requirements for the service.