Latest World News on Internet Business Money Market: SOA Advisor: SaaS, composite applications and SOA: Making them work together

SOA Advisor
October 11, 2007
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ISSUE SPONSORED BY: IONA Technologies - Making Software Work Together

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FEATURED ARTICLE:
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SaaS, composite applications and SOA: Making them work together
[by Robert D. Schneider]

Aside from the media buzz, at first glance SOA, composite
applications and SaaS appear to have very little in common. As it
turns out, however, increasing numbers of organizations are coming up
with innovative ways to combine the unique strengths of each of these
technology platforms to produce new types of solution environments
capable of enhance the user experience while increasing the
organization's overall ROI and responsiveness.

To illustrate the examples in this article, I refer back to
Pay-N-Pray Motors, the deep-discount car rental company I introduced
in two previous articles ("Web Service-Enabling Relational Databases
for SOA" and "SOA and Composite Applications"). Despite their
relentless focus on cost-cutting, as you'll soon see Pay-N-Pray
Motors has a very progressive IT department, one that is constantly
investigating new ways to deliver value to their users.
http://go.techtarget.com/r/2365837/6276287

What is SaaS?

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists showered buckets of money
on a new class of technology company: the Application Service
Provider (ASP). The primary mission of many ASPs was to host some of
the better known enterprise software packages that had previously
been installed in the customer's data center. Going forward, the
customer was still responsible for purchasing the software, while the
ASP then acted as an outsourced hosting department and charged either
by user or by deployed application. End users would then connect to
these applications via either a browser, or more likely the same
PC-based rich client software they always had used: from the users'
perspective, the ASP simply provided a different endpoint. At the
time, the expectation was that many large enterprises would gladly
pay someone to take the expensive and tedious burden of running and
maintaining heavyweight enterprise software off their hands.

Unfortunately, the combination of the dot-com implosion, enterprise
software vendor resistance to new business models and general
customer skepticism crippled this nascent industry. Many ASPs shut
down, customers lost vital data and the venture capitalists were
forced to downgrade from proudly driving Ferraris to skulking about
in Porsches.

However, just as the downfall of the plodding dinosaur soon saw the
ascent of the nimbler mammal, a new class of vendor sprang up from
the wreckage of the ASP. Rather than simply host someone else's
bloated packaged application, these new providers built newer, more
focused and lightweight solutions. In addition, the primary means of
accessing and maintaining these new applications was via thin client
browsers, which translated to much less work to get a customer into
production. The selling model was also simplified, with most
customers paying a simple monthly subscription per user or instance.
This approach has proven very successful. Now that high quality,
high-speed Internet connections have become commonplace, many
organizations (large and small) have opted to let someone else
shoulder the burden of developing and maintaining critical enterprise
applications.

Read more about SOA, SaaS and composite applications here.
http://go.techtarget.com/r/2365838/6276287

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Not a subscriber to the SOA Advisor? Sign up now.
"http://go.techtarget.com/r/2365844/6276287

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MORE ON THIS TOPIC:
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* Who's killing SOA?
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http://go.techtarget.com/r/2365845/6276287

* The standards behind Web services
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* SOA Learning Guide
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SOA RESOURCES
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Software as a Service (SaaS) business models Blog
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Parsing a SWIFT Message
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Accelerating SOA Projects with Early Integration Testing
http://go.techtarget.com/r/2365856/6276287

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