Platforms and Services

I'm on a plane heading to a meeting where we're going to discuss the new and exciting architectures our development teams are working on. I can't talk about them here because a) my corporate overlords would swiftly eviscerate me and stick my head on a spike as a warning to others b) things can change quickly at this stage and whatever I described here would probably be wrong by the time we ship whatever it is c) architecture is just one part of the story.

There seems to be a lot of buzz around different platform designs and delivery models, but it’s also important focus on what these platforms are delivering. So while we're justifiably proud of the performance and scalability you get from our platforms (either physical or virtual) we know that these are just a means to deliver application services. You can have a great architecture design, but if the application services it delivers don't provide enough value, you have a problem. If you need to add additional layers to give you advanced security, authentication or true application layer acceleration, then your architecture - no matter how good it is won’t deliver the value you need.