The 5 Pillars of Connected Systems – Rethinking Infrastructure

On of the most interesting sessions for me at Tech-Ed in Amsterdam this year was one given by Gianpaolo Carraro in the 5 Pillars of Connected Systems:

I’ll let you read his site for more details on what he means by this and the move to a Service Oriented way of looking at things. I might even comments on whether I think he is right (or not). For me, though, it set off a whole load of thoughts about the Infrastructure/Platform v Application split. If something is a pillar then surely it is Infrastructure and at least part of the Platform, but I don’t know any businesses who regard work-flow as an Infrastructure Service available to all to consume, likewise for Identity and the other pillars.

This is a huge mind-set change that our industry needs to go through if it is to come to fruition. In most of the businesses that I know and deal with there is a huge divide between Application and Infrastructure and the thought of the Infrastructure organisation handling services which directly relate to the end delivery of an application would make most Application Architects go into a right old tis (as we say in these parts). That kind of interdependency on organisation is a real problem. Many of the challenges we face are not technology ones – they are people ones.