The objective of our new Cloud Revenues program is to build a knowledge base of insights and materials to support Solution Selling new Cloud offerings.

Key insights include those from key thought leaders – For example this piece on the Cloud SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is powerful and timely.

Tom zooms in on the heart of the matter, what the real disruption effect of the Cloud will be, which is that an entirely new vision of IT itself is needed.

Focusing on the SOA as the headline for this he introduces a new iteration of the model to reflect this Cloud wave, what he calls the ‘Distributed SOA’.

This refers to extending the services oriented approach across multiple domains which is what Cloud ideal for facilitating via Federated Clouds, and so he accurately identifies the key trend direction.

In short the Cloud is about providing not just an application hosting environment but also interconnecting “plumbing”.

It’s timely because also at the same moment the Canadian E-Health standards organization published their Cloud strategy document which, in short, can be summarized as a focus on this same Cloud SOA concept.

They make the especially powerful connection about how the Cloud can be used to accelerate deployment of EHR standards programs, like theirs.

This could include establishing cloud implementations to service common software applications used by multiple facilities in a region or jurisdiction, provisioning EMR and CIS application capabilities through cloud. In addition, jurisdictions may wish to deploy multiple HIALs, or they may wish to improve scaling and extensibility of a single HIAL through virtualization of services. The SOA upon which the Blueprint for EHR solutions is based is well suited to transition to a cloud-based IT model.

That’s a very powerful and very explicit linkage between the primary value of Cloud migrations and the recommended EHR standards from Canada Health Infoway.