Cassatt Founder and CEO Bill Coleman delivered the opening keynote at the SOA Web Services Edge at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on Monday, June 5. Coleman spoke on the topic, “Software Isn’t IT Anymore.”

The event is being colocated with the Enterprise Open Source Conference and Exhibition and Real-World Ajax Seminar, all of which continue through Tuesday, June 6.

Coleman outlined a vision of the future in which broadband access, open source software, and the creation of true service-oriented architectures (SOAs) deliver a variety of services to customers who are given much more choice than they are given today.

With respect to SOAs, he noted that the industry has "been working on this for awhile. It took a lot of things to get to the point where the current Web 2.0 era" has come about. "Broadband is a big driver (here)," he said, noting that  "70 percent of homes in the U.S. now have it.  Why did Google take off, for example? Because the moment broadband took off Google had the best model to capitalize on it."

Coleman envisioned a future "3.0" era in which operations costs on the margin "start driving toward zero," in which straight-through processing becomes the norm, and transparency rules.

"The transformation of business and society is based on the ability to do things better, faster, and cheaper. As productivity advances we can do more things for less. (In this environment), the Internet becomes the most powerful transaction machine in the history of the world. It allows dramatically increased response to customers. And with SOA, businesses are more flexible, can be more responsive, and this increases effectiveness."

The "good enough" climate for applications "means horizontal applications that can be used by anybody. Good enough means were not adding huge value anymore." He said that the three main categories of enterprise applications--supply, production, and distribution--"are inefficient if they're not end-to-end services with straight-through processing."

Coleman also spoke of what he termed the "disintegration of applications into services," and he termed open source "the accelerator, the world's first viable model of reusable code" as a primary driver of this process. This distintegration means companies will literally be able to swap in modules in the future in a way that they cannot in the typical environment of vendor lock-in experienced today.

All of these factors means that "This is the perfect storm for IT, the end of IT as we know it," he said. Coleman's presentation was followed by a Q&A session, and was carried live on SYS-CON.TV.  Other sessions at the two-day event will continue to be carried live on SYS-CON.TV as well.