Utilisation of virtual infrastructures to assist SOA for efficient realisation of SaaS

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has become a well-known, elusive acronym in ICT. Many conflicting definitions of SOA among the business and development communities have evolved due to the significant attention it has received since Alexander Pasik coined SOA in 1994. An abstract framework, the reference model for SOA is published to clarify this misconceives by OASIS recently. However, beside this complexity, SOA has assisted few businesses to increase business competitive advantage by utilising the ICT more meaningfully to provide faster throughput. Many recent surveys by Gartner, BEA, etc. given the companies confidence to invest in accelerated spending and aggressive adaptation of SOA within the business models. The recent European survey sponsored by BEA, found that many companies (55%) view SOA as “the best way to support the use of social networking and 'Web 2.0' development techniques in their IT infrastructure”. This points to the illusion that companies comprehend 'web services' or 'xbXML' as SOA or vice versa, although these are only specialised implementations of SOA. Regardless of the implementation technique the focus of utilising SOA is to realise; development of collaborative environments, on-demand business application services provision, viable business applications delivery through Software as a Service (SaaS) model, 'Mashups' and composite applications enabled to be driven by end-users, etc. SaaS is relatively a new term coined by Webex offering 'Webex meeting hosting' on-demand service, in 1999, which then began to be more widely used since the SaaS Conference held in Santa Clara, March 2005. It has provided a new meaning to the previous terms; Application Services Provision, on-demand and utility computing. In general delivering the software functionalities (or services) via the Internet technologies are called SaaS and the ability of using the Internet, Web as a platform, to read and write rich content collaboratively are called 'Web 2.0'. The convergence of SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 has given the ability to interconnect service components offered by various providers to create Enterprise Mashups that serve Business Processes of each organisation. The overall Total Cost of Ownership can be decreased by the internal implementation of SOA and it can further decreased by connecting organisation's SOA to SaaS providers. Such implementations facilitate quick realisation of the associated benefits. The utilisation of Enterprise Mashups and automation of Business Processes are strong drivers to reduce TCO, advancement in operational efficiencies and acquiring new business opportunities. It is becoming more evident that in order to achieve this realisation providers as well as consumers of above technologies are required to integrate Virtualisation Technologies within their Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This paper put forward this important notion and details how organisations and developers should execute their next move in achieving the 'spontaneous enterprise'