Many of us in the IT industry have been excited about SOA as a positive, disruptive innovation for quite a few years now. It didn’t take long for those who were early adopters (and who suffered the wounds and bear the scars!) to extend the service oriented concept to enable a Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE).  “Services” in the SOE were primarily internal – HR, purchasing, facilities management — and the benefit of thinking of the enterprise as a SOE was that it facilitated more effective business-to-IT alignment.

Now, McKinsey & Company has published their Ten Tech-enabled Business Trends to Watch:

Trend 1: Distributed cocreation moves into the mainstream
Trend 2: Making the network the organization
Trend 3: Collaboration at scale
Trend 4: The growing ‘Internet of Things’
Trend 5: Experimentation and big data
Trend 6: Wiring for a sustainable world
Trend 7: Imagining anything as a service
Trend 8: The age of the multisided business model
Trend 9: Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid
Trend 10: Producing public good on the grid

One of those trends— # 7: Imagining anything-as-a-service—caught my attention because it illustrates just how “disruptive” the concept of discrete services (SOA) has become and how the SOE has enabled new business models and opportunities for growth.

In this article in the McKinsey Quarterly, the authors point out that the SOE strategy is being extended to an ever-widening range of business services – where the consumer of the service pays only for what they need or use, and where new revenue opportunities are realized by re-purposing existing services and assets.

Most of us are familiar with SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings like Google Apps, SalesForce, and dozens of others. But a rapidly increasing trend is the availability of non-IT “services” including buying transportation by the hour (ZipCar), instead of buying a car. More and more companies are creating and marketing new services based on business capabilities they originally developed for their own purposes. They’re generating new sources of revenue from components of their internal corporate value chains – McKinsey dubbed this strategy “unbundled production”.

This disruptive view of assets and of physical and intellectual capital creates new opportunities for arrays of high-value service offerings – new opportunities for many businesses to evolve to a new level of Service Oriented Enterprise and to adopt a Service Oriented Business Model (SOBM).

I’m going to talk more about this business trend on the Strategic IT Architecture site and about how we as IT professionals can provide a tremendous value-added service to our companies. We’re well positioned to enable our enterprise to leverage a SOBM whenever it offers opportunity, by applying the practices we’ve honed while implementing SOA.

Of course, a robust virtualized platform is the foundation for virtually (cool pun!) all Cloud Computing – public clouds like Amazon and Google, or private corporate Clouds.

One really significant aspect of virtualization is the contribution that a virtualized IT platform makes to “Evergreen IT” – a term coined, I believe, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In addition to reducing the number of physical servers, which of course reduces electrical consumption and heat generation (less air conditioning), most Hypervisor systems can be configured to automatically shut down servers that aren’t needed during periods when less capacity is required.

During a recent lunch with a client’s VMWare representatives, I was treated to a good explanation of the latest green-IT features offered by their suite of products. Although I haven’t put them to the test, yet, it sounds pretty impressive – e.g., claims of as much as 80% reduction in use of electricity (supported by a Gartner report)!

Given all of the benefits that IT virtualization (and Cloud Computing) is demonstrating, it’s hard not to visualize a future for IT that’s built on information utilities. Obviously, in these early years… most large corporations will maintain their own internal “IT utilities” and will realize tremendous benefits by doing so. But eventually…. Will it make sense for even mega-users of IT resources not to tap into the commercial “IT power plants”?

Of course, I’m also the guy who wrote an article in 1985, for our leading IT trade publication, in which I predicted that the age of the software “factory” was imminent! I could see quite clearly that object oriented architectures and tools were about to bring an end to the long and painful process of reinventing software for every new product or application. Oops!

But this time…. The future not only looks pretty compelling, it’s being proven more and more viable at a rapid pace.

I’ve just posted some guidance for developing a Cloud Computing Roadmap on my Strategic IT Architecture Web site. Obviously, it’s a complex topic and there are many, many variations on the routes you might map out.

One approach that I didn’t mention in that post – space is limited in a blog posting – was an approach that mitigates and contains risk, while still delivering a solid foundation for internal Clouds and near-term ROI and operational benefits.  Server platform virtualization.

Virtualization is a mature and proven platform architecture that greatly improves asset utilization and can significantly enhance operational efficiency. Clouds are based on a virtualized platform.

In order to fully evolve into a Cloud, and provide all of the benefits that Clouds offer, you will eventually need to enhance the virtual environment with some additional capabilities – e.g., self provisioning, dynamic resource allocation, measured/metered usage. You’ll also want to make some enhancements to the platform architecture to better accommodate multi-tenancy, elasticity and other powerful Cloud capabilities.

But as a solid first step toward a Cloud Computing target, and as a means of containing risk – including the risk of moving core applications to an external, still unproven commercial Cloud – consider implementing a virtualized computing IT ecosystem.

One additional technical point: As you develop your implementation plan for a virtualized platform, you do need to consider what kind of “Hypervisor” you’ll use. The most critical decision is whether to use a Type 1 (bare metal) product or a Type 2 (hosted) Hypervisor.  Type 1 provides maximum performance because it executes on the hardware (bare metal) and provides its own operating system support. Type 2 is installed as a guest operating system on a hosted system, so it sacrifices some performance because it’s running in a layer above the native OS.