One of the great things about blogging is the spirit of information sharing within the community. An example of this is Jeff Nolan's summary of the Accel/SNRC symposium on Service-Oriented Flexible Computing on his blog. Instead of paying $350, you can read Jeff's blog to get the highlights. Of course, you're missing out on the networking and offline discussions, but given the cost of admission to Jeff's blog, it's the next best thing.

There is a lot of useful information here, and my understanding from Jeff's notes is that service oriented flexible computing is about server side distributed computing. The conference seem to focus on the shifts that are going to occur in the software, hardware, and network layer as a result of this shift in computing architectures. This shift has been happening for some time and there are companies attacking the network, hardware, and systems software (ie. grid computing) side of the problem. However, I don't see how this is all going to work until you address the higher level integration and implementation of business processes in a service oriented architecture.

You can have the flexibility in network infrastructure, distributed storage and computing cycles, and distibuted web services, but you still have to link and orchestrate flows of information across this architecture to implement business processes. Providing tools and standards to make this orchestration happen is not an easy problem. Maybe this will be addressed in day 2 of the conference. I hope Jeff continues to write about it on his blog.