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Risks and Rewards of SOA and SaaS
Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.
As a prelude to answering these questions, a quick definition of the terms will help those new to the topic.
SOA is an approach to developing applications where business rules and functions are broken into small chunks of logic or services that can be combined to suit a specific user's or organization’s needs. Simply speaking, it is the new millennium’s version of callable library routines used in the 1980s and 1990s to accelerate and standardize application development. The difference is that SOA routines can be developed in any language and reside on any platform.
SaaS is a model of software deployment where an application is licensed for use as a service provided to customers on demand (usually via the Internet). Examples of popular SaaS applications are www.Salesforce.com and www.gotomeeting.com.
What connects SaaS to SOA is that many new SaaS offerings are developed using …
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