SOA

IT services more and more consist of services provided by external providers. Significant portions of the infrastructure are not directly managed by the IT departments. The latest trends in the enterprise space, Shared services, SaaS, SOA, outsourcing, etc. suggest that this is not a temporary phenomena.
IT organizations (as well as IT management vendors) need to adjust to the new requirements introduced with this new landscape.

So the question is: how can you do end to end management of a service when the infrastructure for the service depends on combination of multiple internal and external service providers?  read more »

Last month, I've read a post by James Governor of RedMonk (an analyst firm specialized enough to actually know what they are talking about :) where James talked about the “best practices” vs “best infrastructure” inquiring whether SMBs would be better off using infrastructure provided by large service providers like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and if SMBs do choose to use these services more and more what would be the impact of this in the industry.

In the comments, I had pointed out the differences between the “best infrastructure” and “best service (support)”. I keep running into this theme so I wanted to write more about it, if for no other reason to clarify my own thinking.  read more »