EA's are often the champion of large change initiatives that span multiple business units. If they're not on board - we've got problems.

Here's why I ask the question:

1. It's my perception (perhaps incorrect) that the EA leadership typically doesn't come from a background in infrastructure architecture. It's been my observation that the EA's who tend to get promoted usually have a background in business or application architecture. These people are often hesitant to enter deep discussions on CPU power consumption, DNS propagation, VLAN decisions, storage protocols, hypervisor trade-offs, etc.

2. Most people have agreed that the cloud can be viewed as a series of layers. You can attack it from top (SaaS) or bottom (IaaS). Quite frankly, there isn't *that much* architecture in SaaS (other than the secure connection and integration). That leaves IaaS as the starting point - which takes me back to point #1 - IaaS intimidates the EA team - - meaning that they're relying on the I.T. data center operations team (and localized infrastructure architects) to define the foundational IaaS layers which will serve PaaS, Dev/Test, disaster recovery, hadoop clusters, etc.

Any truth here? Leave a comment (moderated) or send me an email either way: jschneider AT MomentumSI DOT com