SaaS Opens Up SOA Beyond the Firewall
The convergence of service-oriented architecture and Software as a Service lays open the possibilities of bringing in services from outside the firewall, which can be “snapped” into place within a company’s infrastructure. This also means that services a company creates can be introduced to a broader market beyond the firewall.
Miko Matsumara, vice president of product marketing for SOA at webMethods, says that as SOA and SaaS mature, the two will open up vast new markets that no one is even thinking of today. I recently spoke with Miko as part of a podcast series launched in conjunction with InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum (held May 22-23 in New York). Miko applies his Yale training in Neuroscience discover new truths about the way services organically interact with each other. And he had plenty to say about the way SOA is evolving in the context of SaaS. (Link to the podcast here from InfoWorld.)
"We're seeing an entire transition in the industry towards business services residing on the Internet," Miko said. First, he said, look at how “you consume Software as a Service in your enterprise.” One of the most exciting aspects of SOA, he said, is that “organized capabilities may be under the control of different ownership domains. It means that you can actually bring services into your company from the outside. At the same time, because of the integration and component architecture and the use of standards, you could just snap it into place and consume software services much like you would consume internal IT services. It all snaps together like LEGOs.”
But the story gets even more interesting as SOA-SaaS evolves, Miko continued. “Organizations are now beginning to deploy what they have to offer into the economy, deploying their business services onto a network deployed model,” he explained. “This actually takes it beyond Software as a Service and it starts to get into business services on the Internet.
“We're starting to see that the entire economy is not just moving to delivering software as services, but delivering packages, books, and anything that you can imagine in products and services as Internet-connected service interfaces.”