"SOA serves as the foundation for the move into the cloud," stated Dr. Kareem Yusuf, Director Product Management, WebSphere Software, IBM, in his keynote at SOA World Conference & Expo in NYC Tuesday.

"What are the characteristics of the cloud?" Dr Yusuf then asked. Shared infrastructure, self-service capabilities, and the fact that it will be virtualized are several that he mentioned. He also noted that two things stand out about the cloud - self-service access and management, and elastic scaling.