There are systems of record and systems of engagement and one day there will even be systems of satisfaction. But what will tie them all together are systems of interaction.
At the IBM Innovate 2013 conference this week, IBM rolled out a series of extensions to its application development strategy that included the ability to build and deploy both PHP applications running on Zend servers and mobile computing applications running on IBM Worklight platforms in the cloud.
According to Eric Naiburg, program director for IBM Rational Application Lifecycle Management, the majority of the applications currently being built in the cloud tend to be customer-facing systems of engagement. The challenge IT organizations mainly face today is integrating those applications with the systems of record running on premise. Add to that mix the systems of satisfaction that IBM is developing on top of the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform, and Naiburg says you get what IBM is describing as next-generation systems of interaction.
During this week’s event, IBM announced a series of tactical moves targeting DevOps issues to help further the development and management of cloud applications. A new IBM Log Analysis service makes it easier to analyze terabytes of machine data, while IBM SmartCloud Application Monitoring Insight is a service that tracks application performance in real time.
Rather than thinking in terms of deployment models, IBM is trying to foster the emergence of cloud computing strategies based on the type of application being developed. The different performance requirements and attributes of the application workloads involved will then dictate what portion of any given application should run where.
At the moment, most IT organizations are still struggling with integrating applications running across different clouds. But as IT organization start to think more programmatically about systems that exist in multiple clouds, it’s only a matter of time before application integration in the cloud gets a lot more granular.
