Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« SOA Has Many Owners; Needs to be Collectively Managed | Main | SOA and SaaS Will Open Up New Vistas We Haven't Thought of Yet » May 24, 2007Consider SaaS for 'General-Purpose' SOA Services Service-oriented architecture and Software as a Service (SaaS) both use the word "service," but with two different meanings. And, typically, SOA has been within the firewall, while SaaS has been outside the firewall. Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA Technologies, says it won't be long, however, before SaaS and SOA converge. As part of our series of podcasts with industry leaders that we launched in conjunction with InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum (held May 22-23 in New York), I had the chance to speak with Eric, who has been leading the charge for standards in the Web services/SOA space for some time. So I knew it would be interesting to get his latest take on the state of SOA. (Link to the podcast here at InfoWorld.) One emerging trend Eric is watching closely is Software as a Services (SaaS). Namely, as things progress, many services that are part of the SOA may actually come from outside of the company. Eric feels that as enterprises break down applications into reusable services, and "start to think about hosting some of those reusable services outside of the company, and delivered in a Software as a Service mode." Likely candidates for SaaS-based services would be commoditized portions of ERP or packaged applications, he said. "I see Software as a Service taking a very important role in SOA, especially around commodity or very general-purpose functions, such as accounting and billing, security, and maybe transformation, where it's not really to a company's competitive advantage to develop, build and host those kinds of services." Eric also spoke about the management issues in SOA deployments. One issue is making sure that services generated by business units are scalable and ready to fit business requirements, he said. "We see emerging technology such as SCA [Service Component Architecture], providing the capability to compose multiple services together." Eric also said orchestration engines such as BPEL are playing a role in service management, "where you can take the very large-grained interface that meets the needs of the business and decompose it or assemble the smaller grained services that the developers might be working on." Also, thanks to Web 2.0, interactive consumer sites like Google Maps are upping the expectations for enterprise applications, he said. "You've got a couple of challenges there. One of them is to get the level of interactivity improved in the user interfaces on your enterprise applications based on adoption of some newer technologies such as AJAX and maybe Flash, and some of these nice presentation technologies that are coming out." Although companies need a way to connect those interactive technologies to existing systems and data sources, Newcomer cautions against thinking of a mash-up as a means to integration. "We've seen this with portals and with screen-scraping," he says. "You want to make sure that you have a good design for scalability, performance and maintainability -- which sometimes, taking that approach might get in the way of." (Click here at the InfoWorld site to hear the entire seven-minute podcast.) Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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