SOA and Going Green

You cannot open up a magazine today without reading about companies, large and small, pushing an environmental strategy and "Going Green".  While the upfront marketing potential has quite a bit of upside, many companies are still focused on utilizing this strategy for cost saving purposes.

So how can implementing a service-oriented architecture  help you achieve this goal?

Well a few ideas come to mind:

• Carpool your Enterprise Architects to work on a bio-diesel bus
• Reduce the carbon emissions from governance meetings
• Diagram all business processes on one square of toilet paper at a time (keeps Sheryl Crow off your back)

All kidding aside, Gartner reports that approximately 10% of a company's corporate tech budget goes toward energy costs - and that could rise to as much as 50% in a few years.  One of the ways many companies are battling this rising cost is to bring their data centers under more manageable control.

ENTER SOA
Without having to go into the details of what many of you already realize, the move toward a SOA and server virtualization creates more hardware flexibility and manageability for companies running large server farms and data centers.

So if you are one of those companies I hear so much about that are having a hard time evangelizing the benefits of SOA to C-Level executives, just don your hemp suit, walk into your CFO's office and let him know SOA will make you green.