What a week at the PDC ! With the CTP release Azure Services Platform I don't think that anyone is doubting anymore about Microsoft ability to understand and execute on "the cloud". But PDC was not only about the cloud, there was tons of stuff on the "this side of the cloud" i.e....

As indicated in various press articles and blog entries in the recent weeks, PDC will be Microsoft's 'coming out' party for its cloud services platform. These additional platform assets will create a vast array of new possibilities, but at the same time introduce new architectural elements that architects...

Being a non native English speaker I regularly make pronunciation or grammar mistakes and I usually don't mind. There is one thing I learned today though that I found amusing mostly because it is a small mistake that is commonly made by pretty much everybody (English native speakers included). It is...

Although cloud storage fabrics are very cool, a lot of multi-tenant applications will be build against a database. Based on some work we did on our super famous sample application LitwareHR :) , we just released a blueprint providing guidance on writing a SQL Server based, single instance, multi-tenant...

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a webcast (~1hour) going through some of the architectural challenges faced by ISV architects in building S+S solutions, as well as the ones faced by architects in large enterprises consuming S+S solutions. Below a couple of slides from the webcast : The Enterprise Perspective...

A couple of months ago I wrote an article providing a high level explanation of the basic concepts of S+S, now my friends in Asia Pacific need your help visualizing this article through a great video. Anyone can participate – whether you’re a student, IT pro, architect or someone with movie...

As I mentioned previously , the study of clouds (cloud computing of course) is becoming a very popular topic in the software industry. In the last couple of weeks alone, I read tens of articles on the subject. I found many of them proposing various type of taxonomies for cloud computing, utility computing...

More seriously... Eugenio just announced and released on Codeplex the latest drop of LitwareHR. Although the application UI was treated with a welcomed 'facelift' (we were told that LitwareHR UI was "too 1990s"), the main effort for this release was to move from local storage infrastructure...

Over the last 2 years or so ( here and here for example), I have been discussing how consumer grade IT services might/will be used as part of enterprise IT, Gartner even says that Consumerization Will Be Most Significant Trend Affecting IT During Next 10 Years . Today, Eugenio pointed me to a blog entry...

Yesterday, we released ( here ) on the MSDN Architecture center a section dedicated to Software + Services (S+S). We realized that depending on whether you are a large enterprise, an ISV, a hosting company or trying to establish yourself as a trusted marketplace for software services, you will have a...

Yesterday I recorded a 25min. walk through of litwareHR v2 (recording available here ) Even though the primary goal of LitwareHR is to elevate architectural best practices in a Software + Services world, this particular webcast does not dive very deep in the architecture of the application, rather it...

Below is an diagram I have been using for a while in my presentations on software + services (more about s+s here ); so due to popular demand :) here is an explanation of it in my blog. The image is meant to represent the new (or evolving) relationships among the different actors in a S+S world. Of course...

Over the week end, I was looking at AMZN DevPay announcement and I started thinking in more general terms about the architectural impact of different monetization schemes. At a high level, software / service monetization can be put into 4 main categories: perpetual license (e.g. one time charge of $85...

In the next couple of days I might have fun again and offer my 10 or so 2008 predictions as I did in 2007 . (many of which I think are still very valid) but in case I don't, I wanted to make sure that at least this one gets out. - 2008 will be the year of the INTRAnet-SaaS (or INTRAnet-S+S) Similarly...

When I went to New Zealand I did not manage to see any hobbits but I had the pleasure to record an ARCcast i.e. architecture podcast (direct link to podcast here ) with Lukas Svoboda ; not too surprisingly, we discussed Software + Services and SaaS from an Architect's point of view. The talk covers various...