Virtualization has become a hot topic. Cloud computing is the latest and most prominent application of this time-honored idea, which is almost as old as the computing field itself. The term "cloud" seems to have originated with someone's drawing of the Internet as a puffy cloud hiding many servers and connections. A user can receive a service from the cloud without ever knowing which machine (or machines) rendered the service, where it was located, or how many redundant copies of its data there are. One of the big concerns about the cloud is that it may assign many computational processes to one machine, thereby making that machine a bottleneck and giving poor response time. Faouzi Kamoun addresses this concern head on, and assures us that in most cases the virtualization used in the cloud and elsewhere improves performance. He also addresses a misconception made prominent in a Dilbert cartoon, when the boss said he wanted to virtualize the servers to save electricity. ...

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Traditionally Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have been pursued as two independent initiatives. Recently, the BPM-SOA combination is being advocated as the best approach, enterprises have, to bring a closer alignment between business processes and IT resources and reach the desired business agility and responsiveness to changing business requirements. This article takes a closer look to the BPM-SOA convergence trend. It recognizes that the convergence landscape is not as smooth as many believe. The article then tries to sketch a roadmap to further facilitate a broader BPM-SOA adoption, while identifying the main hurdles standing in the BPM-SOA convergence landscape.

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