A couple of blogs back I wrote about the idea of how far a company can go in terms of virtualising it's IT, i.e. having somebody else hosting it, but wondered how all the external services could work together. It seems the idea has not escaped others. I first came across this blog on the Loosely Coupled web site. Although the author was trying to make another point (i.e. what is the ratio between objects, components and services in an enterprise) he trys to envisage a company which has no IT but uses services from, for example, salesforce.com and brings everything together using Grand Central and maybe the Amazon Simple Queue Service.
Searching further I found this infoworld article which also extols on Grand Central's capabilities and focuses on their use of a hosted BPEL engine which lets developers define their own processes and have them hosted.
Now that we have some of the business services/processes hosted and something like GrandCentral/Amazon to integrate them, what remains? Well first of all we need a lot more business services. GrandCentral's web site seems to offer a lot of the "informational" web services as hosted by organizations such as XMethods. Difficult to see how a meaningful chunk of business functionality could be implemented with those. (Maybe I doing an injustice to GrandCentral as I'm not a member of them and couldn't log in, plus the fact that their web site reminds me of a maze.) Secondly we need user interfaces - can they be hosted? Thirdly we need lots of data storage, which is properly managed and can also be used to host data warehouses. And fourthly we need alternate sourcing for this stuff.
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