Vendors must look to SOA for flexibility

The only flexible and scalable partner for software-as-a-service (SaaS) is service-oriented architecture (SOA), says Deon Eachells, Solutions Manager, Softworx, an EOH company and distributor of Infor in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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“From a SaaS delivery perspective, SOA is what separates the current generation of SaaS providers. From a consumption perspective, you certainly don't require a SOA to use SaaS, but if you want to effectively mix and match external services with on-premise assets and services, SOA will make it possible to efficiently build, deploy and manage composite applications.”

The core philosophies of SOA are interoperability and reusability through which the re-use of services and components is promoted, meaning that new applications can be quickly assembled to respond to changing market conditions or demands. With the shortening of project time frames comes a faster response to changing business requirements.

Eachells says SOA moves companies from a “previous generation” systems architecture based on independent applications, tightly coupled together by custom messages or processes, to a new type of architecture based on independent services tied together by a standards-based messaging. SOA enables IT infrastructure to be moved from an inefficient, inflexible model - with vertical, siloed applications - to a less expensive, business-wide model that delivers a reusable suite of interoperable services.

“SOA has the attention of businesses all over the world and the IT industry continues to adopt its underlying strategies and principles. It's not difficult to figure out why - SOA is an important enabler for strategic business transformation. Delivering SaaS is, however, a completely different aspect in the SOA race and the vendor which delivers the best and truest SOA application will have a significant competitive edge.”

He adds that customers today are more interested in buying packaged solutions than developing their own. This will therefore pose a different challenge to the vendors because the big question is how and at which level they start to break down solutions to create the reusable components.

“If you look at the large ERP solutions it is almost impossible to break these up so the best way is when the vendor develops a new package or solution by re-writing the older packages and using new technology,” Eachells says. “This is certainly the right time to do this. So the race will be to see which of the major vendors can produce their new applications in this way. Customers are already asking for the SaaS model but the question is whether the vendors are able to deliver.”

The bottom line, Eachells says, is that SaaS vendors have to be able to offer something that is flexible enough to meet customer needs, but you can't do that efficiently without a very good SOA model. "If they don't have the flexibility to deliver the functionality you want, or if they can't integrate with you significantly faster than a classic on-premise piece of software could, odds are it's not real SaaS."

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BY DEON EACHELLS, SOLUTIONS MANAGER, SOFTWORX
Source：iTWeb

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