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So here we are in Las Vegas at IBM Pulse 2009, a little right after the keynote, and I thought I'd ask my fine colleague here, James Governor, what he thought of the keynote.

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Great. You're asking me?

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So we had like, basically we had some dynamic infrastructure and cloud talk.

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Yes, we did.

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And then we had the old, well, it's sort of new for the general public, but for us kind of old, the Maximo taking over Tivoli sort of thing with the industry verticals and utilities and grids and all that.

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So there's basically like three things to pick from, it seems like, smart meter stuff, essentially to collapse it into something simplistic, cloud stuff, and then dynamic infrastructure.

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Okay. So basically what this is about, this is about software groups selling applications, but not calling them applications.

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Clearly, the industry frameworks that Tivoli is putting forward around service management in utilities, retail, petrochemicals, finance, and so on, those are applications, really.

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I mean, they're built with, you know, when they talk to specific business use cases and so on.

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I think Tivoli is, perhaps it's surprising that Tivoli would be leading an application charge, but they undoubtedly are.

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For anyone that's been in the world of system and service management, I have to say it's somewhat ironic that the term now being used for some of these is frameworks.

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Right, right.

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Wait, did I say frameworks at a Tivoli event?

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Wait.

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I keep on expecting like sort of loud bells to go off.

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They're industry frameworks though, not tech frameworks.

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Industry frameworks, not tech frameworks.

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So suffice to say, I think, one, it's very clear that IBM is increasingly pushing into a more application-focused business, obviously supported by its services business as well, and tying lots of pieces together.

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And I think from an IBM perspective, it's really where does service-oriented architecture meet this kind of dynamic infrastructural service management.

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It's kind of bringing SOA together with ITSM, and, you know, I don't know what acronym you get when you put those together, but IBM is calling it dynamic infrastructure.

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That's right, that's right.

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And, like, being a longtime Tivoli follower, how do you think this, like, hooks up with autonomic computing and things like that?

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I think it's really part of the same train.

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Right here.

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Autonomic, I think, was always challenging just from the perspective that, A, it's such kind of a weird, dorky term.

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You know, if you think of this morning, Tom Rose of Familia, the GM of WebSphere, said complex event processing.

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Let's call it business processing instead, because you don't want to start by marketing the idea of complex.

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It's kind of ironic that IBM would be talking about so much simplicity when they're certainly not associated with simplicity.

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I think as much as anything else, you know, this is an evolution, which is fine.

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I think that's great.

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We do need to tie this stuff together.

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We do need to consolidate asset models, service models, and so on.

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I think where the problem is, is when they start talking about cloud.

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So, dynamic infrastructure, I think, is great.

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I think the idea of tying together service and asset management of physical assets for plants and power and so on is great.

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But I think what IBM is talking about, the cloud, is really deeply flawed.

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Yeah.

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It seemed like there were sort of two or three different what is the cloud things that were floated around this morning.

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Yeah, there were a couple of different definitions, and clearly they all, to me, sounded like on demand.

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I always thought that on demand deserved, I mean, as much as anything else, it's kind of interesting because on demand sort of created a context that was then delivered by the cloud.

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Right, right.

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And I think as much as anything else, I would rather IBM just brought the term on demand back in terms of this notion of users don't know what it looks like or don't have to worry about it and all of this.

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At the end of the day, one of the things is that cloud initially, at least, was certainly a developer-led phenomenon, and they absolutely cared what it was that they were doing.

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And, in fact, if we think about the applications that we use in terms of the cloud, sure, we actually know what the application is.

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The idea that it's transparent to what?

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So I thought it was funny this morning, IBM was talking about this use case of a utility company, an energy company, and say there had been a big storm and they needed to do a bunch of repairs.

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So they would have 300 guys that came in from outside and this notion of, ah, well, you wouldn't want to provision a server just for the emergency case of 300 people.

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What the hell are you talking about?

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300 people on a collaboration server is nothing.

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I mean, you know, yes, clearly you can do that cloud, but one would hope you could do that with your internal infrastructure.

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It's not exactly putting a strain on the network, as it were.

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Yeah, yeah.

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It seems like the cloud for IT ops person, the answer is sort of like self-provisioning and simplicity and pools of resources.

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Yeah, and I think...

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Versus like cloud for an end user is actually like SaaS or an application or something.

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Exactly, and so I think one of the things, I mean, so that I have been thinking about, so you think about Nick Gall at Gartner Group and his articulation of the post-SOA term.

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He talks about web-oriented architecture.

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And clearly, web-oriented architecture is somewhat different from service-oriented architecture, although there are some patterns that are common to both of them.

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I began to think about, you know, basically what are the, is the cloud sort of, is that web-oriented operations?

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Is cloud woo?

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Are we wooing the cloud?

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So do we have woa and woo?

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And I would just say that what IBM is saying is definitely not woo.

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It's business as usual.

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It's just about flexible delivery of application.

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All of the stuff that is goodness, all of the stuff that Tivoli has been talking about since 1995, that stuff all has value.

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It just is not cloud.

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Cloud does involve difference.

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If it's business as usual, that's just provisioning service and automation and virtualization, which is all good.

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But if I hear another person telling me that cloud equals SOA plus virtualization plus automation, I'm going to, well, I'm just going to ignore them and rubbish the idea as much as I can.

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That's no way to woo James Governor.

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That's no way to woo me.

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Well, great.

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We'll get back to like after another keynote and see what you think.

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Woo-hoo!