SaaS Blogs

Phil Wainewright just wrote an article discussing the effect of service oriented architectures on “old application categories” and the relationship to SaaS. This prompted me to really think about the effects of the SOA proposition on “old category” software. One of the more interesting things to note is that SOA presents the IT industry with a revolutionary approach to developing new applications; it is really one of the few times that a natural transition exists in the IT world. It gives a way to deliver old application categories as “native” SOA components, possibly allowing them to continue to participate in the new SOA/Software as a service economy.

As with any investment and management scenario, IT departments will look to find away to salvage any old yet still viable investments. Standard economic law will force the IT decision makers to see if there is a way to incorporate a new, cost efficient model like SaaS/SOA while continuing to realize return on prior IT investments. These “old categories” could be transformed through SOA to be value chain participants rather than be discarded. SOA defines contractual obligations that a SOA producer has to an SOA consumer. In addition, it provides a guarantee of what I like to call “implementation blindness”. This means that any useful portions of “old category” software can be repackaged as SOA (assuming no other issue like scalability, etc. pose a problem) and reused, without the danger of being tied to the “old category” because of the natural facade presented by SOA. This concept is what will most likely help both SOA and SaaS to smoothly transition into more and more IT departments.