TIBCO's Silver Fabric - a golden lining

I attended TIBCO's PaaS workshop, where they showed and demoed Silver Fabric - the product that has come forth from the DataSynapse acquisition in September 2009. Erik Hageman, Mario Invernizzi and Steven van der Kroft lead the session.
The location was the Radisson Blu near Schiphol, a fine location with excellent service and food & drinks. After we had those, the session started at 1 PM

Silver Fabric is a middle layer between the OS and application. It sits right in between, so it can allow for upgrades, scale up or down, and failover and failback - without human intervention (hold your horses please)

The SI is dead. Long live the Supplier Integrator

Have we reached peak SI is a splendid post by Peter Evans Greenwood about the changing IT world.
On one side of the boxing ring there is the traditional system integrator, on the other side there is a multitude of change agents:

• Business taking back budget for IT spend from local IT
• On-demand and on-time (i.e. small) projects rather than "strategic" million-dollar ones
• SaaS for a quick proof of concept over old-fashioned PoCs
• Standardisation over customisation (what I call "Shop and Stop")
• Consumerism outperforming enterprise shop offering
• Overall decimation of the traditional SI Time & Material model

How Cloud computing will drive Enterprise Integration

In a few recently witnessed presentations it was extraordinary to see how two utterly unrelated matters were seamlessly joined together on the same slide

I'm talking about virtualisation and Cloud computing on the one hand, and world-wide-web services on the other hand

These two entirely different worlds (physical iron infrastructure versus logical business functionality) have been more often associated together over the last months, but it seems to be getting a bit out of hand now

How can physically relocating infrastructure give you fully disclosed backend systems? Of course it can't. It will force you to adhere to a few standards here and there, but that's all on the (rather dull) infrastructural level.