JAva still important to cloud efforts

Cloud and SOA - Saving the Federal Government Big Bucks
— The U.S. government's Federal Trade Commission’s long list of responsibilities includes handling consumer fraud com-plaints, the National Do Not Call Registry for marketers and iden-tity theft cases. Until recently, the FTC's information technology systems handled these different types of complaints separately without communicating with one another. But that all changed when Bluedog, a systems integrator and software developer based in Dublin, Ireland, helped bring to fruition an SOA (service-oriented architecture) that modernized the FTC’s CIS (consumer information system). The $1.2 mil- lion upgrade involved bringing open standards and a Web-based architecture to the core system. Now, with cloud capabilities "baked in," the once-radical idea of SOA as a means to de-couple services from applications means big savings, for government and commercial.