The SOA, SaaS, Web 2.0 Connect

Gartner foretells that SaaS could go a $19.3 billion marketplace by the end of 2011, according to a recent Computerworld article. Gartner also describes that SaaS reached $6.3 billion by the end of last year.

Big numbers. Big money.

Organizations that have got embraced multiple SaaS solutions are experiencing integrating problems. One of the options for resolving this job is to travel to a service-oriented architecture. But that solution is still some ways off as most organisations are still in the planning or early execution phases of SOA.

The inquiry then becomes: How well will SaaS work with SOA?

The answer, fortunately, looks to be: very well, indeed. Particularly when you add Web 2.0 technologies, which can assist computer address the information integrating jobs that SOA doesn't touch.

Robert Schneider wrote a antic article, "SaaS, Complex Applications and SOA: Understanding their Differences and Making Them Work Together." In it, he explicates how they can work together to do work life much easier and simpler for IT and concern users.

Here's what Schneider had to state about SaaS sellers and SOA:

From an SOA perspective, what do SaaS so interesting is that, by and large, these sellers "get it": their offers are much more than SOA-friendly, and often follow with many of its best pattern guidelines. Of course, there are some awful exclusions to the rule, but SOAP-based, WSDL-defined services have got go the de-facto standard for integrating with SaaS solutions. Many SaaS sellers also understand the value of composite applications, and are only too happy to ease deploying these user interface-based integrating components.

The seven-page article walks you through a hypothetical company that tallies a SaaS CRM system and how IT utilizes SOA and mashups to give client service reps entree to charge history from within the CRM system. In effect, the mashup - a Web 2.0 engineering - gives the visual aspect that IT have integrated the information into the SaaS CRM system without actually allowing critical fiscal information to go forth the company.

SaaS sellers aren't unsighted to the possible benefits of SOA and mashups to widen their reach, as this recent article on E-Commerce Times explains. The article utilizes Salesforce.com arsenic an example.

Salesforce recently updated its Vertex codification to let companies to construct their ain on-demand applications. The company is calling this Salesforce SOA and have implied it's SOA as a service - a selling scheme that brands SOA designers hissing with anger, since they argue, with good reason, that you can't "subscribe" to an architecture. Developers can tap Web services and usage them to construct on-demand applications.

To acquire this functionality, you subscribe to the Salesforce Platform Edition, which lets you run to these on-demand apps on Salesforce.com's servers.

By the way, the electroconvulsive therapy article was portion one, implying there will be at least a 2nd article on SOA and SaaS. Part one appeared in the E-Commerce Times on Friday - my conjecture is portion two will run this Friday.

As for the Web 2.0 connexion to SOA, this is still being hashed out. Web 2.0 is still in its early stages, but Gartner foretells that by 2011, 63 percentage of merchandises in the software system system substructure marketplace and 56 percentage in the software application marketplace will back up Web services and Web 2.0 technologies, according to the Computerworld article mentioned earlier.

As Sean Rhody, initiation editor and editor-in-chief of SOA World Magazine, pointed out recently on SYS-CON Linux, you can make SOA without Web 2.0. And you can make Web 2.0 without SOA. But should you? One ground sellers and developers may desire to get married the two is simply that SOA doesn't offer a user interface beyond the browser and Rhody postulates that Web 2.0 and Ajax could take to a better user interface for SOA applications.