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This article discusses the growth of software as a service (SaaS) strategy, the evolution of applications through the Internet. SaaS maybe on the verge of much faster adoption owing to the arrival of the big enterprise-softwares, the emergence of integrated business communities and the increasing problem of minimizing application deployment and maintenance hassles. Benefits offered by the strategy includes time-to-market and low maintenance core, escape from the application-upgrade routine and letting a service provider shoulder the burden of software deployment, maintenance and availability.

This article reports on the launching of the Apache Synapse open source Web service from Apache in August 2005. Synapse is intended to produce a lightweight, scalable, distributed services broker based on Web services standards. The kernel will be X-broker, donated by software vendor Infravio, which will participate in the project along with middleware players Blue Titan, Iona and Sonic Software. Synapse will produce a ubiquitous and standard run-time environment for Web services. The Synapse project differs from Java-based open source enterprise service buses from Iona, Sun and others because it promises a pure Web services implementation.