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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.

Focuses on the efforts of different enterprises in the U.S. to implement a Web service- oriented architecture (SOA). SOA vision; Tools to help developers design and build service-oriented architectures; Security protocols required by service-oriented architectures. INSET: Six Tips for SOA Design.

The article reports that International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) introduced WebSphere software and services in the U.S. in April 2006 that are aimed to overcome barriers to the success of services-oriented architecture (SOA). According to IBM senior vice president and software group executive Steve Mills, such WebSphere releases will refocus the company for a world that is more process-led than technology-led. IBM unveiled eleven new products, twenty product enhancements, and eight service enhancements that are all focused on SOA process integration.

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.

This article presents an interview of two executives from hosted applications or on-demand software service providers. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.corn, elucidated his expectations for the hosted-application paradigm. Benioff thinks that the resurgence of interest in the hosted model was driven by exciting feature of the on-demand model. He added that the hosted model offers a whole breadth of opportunity for the customer to be more successful than ever before, using a whole new model at very low costs and very easy to use. Yet, chief information officers must not be worried because their job is going to be more strategic and more about finding what right thing to do for the business, and less about managing databases. Meanwhile, Grand Central Communications CEO Halsey Minor extolled the virtues of sharing. Minor said that enterprises need to change the way they consume applications. Consider spending $100 million on an enterprise software and get nothing back. Sifting to the hosted or on-demand application reduces this risk and the costs. As for the services of Grand Central, Minor said that there is no upfront on the cost of its platforms. He pointed out that theirs is the only platform that lets clients share their Internet protocol.

The article looks at how Merrill Lynch implemented Service-Oriented Legacy Architecture, a Web services initiative that reduced their information technology overhead since 2000. The objective of the project, which was headed by the company's vice president Jim Crew, was to build applications that leveraged not just the data but also the applications on the mainframe. Thus, Crew and his team used X4ML and made it part of Merrill Lynch's service-oriented architecture. Since then, the team has helped create Web services using a collection of Internet technologies like XML and SOAP to make operations available to programmers. The programmers then can create new applications in modern environments including Java from Sun Microsystems.

The article features Andrew Nash, chief technology officer at Reactivity. He developed identity and access management technologies, wrote a book on Public Key Infrastructure, and co-authored several security standards. He decided to focus on fresh security challenges better suited to an emerging Web services world. While making the rounds of RSA Security's customers, he discovered XML security startup Reactivity, where he encountered technologists who were working on a plug-and-play appliance that would provide secure access to Web services. He joined the Reactivity team in 2004 to lead the evolution of the current Gateway line, which adds XML routing and acceleration.

The article focuses on the acquisition of Web services company Blue Titan by SOA Software. Blue Titan decided to sell because of market evolution. Frank Martinez, executive vice president at SOA, said there is an increase in demand for a broader set of capabilities for service-oriented infrastructure. SOA Software, with Blue Titan, can now offer service-oriented architecture security, governance, management, and the mediation provided by Blue Titan Network Director. SOA Software intends to partner with enterprise service bus or messaging infrastructure providers, delivering solutions big companies lack.

This article focuses on the objection to the software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The main core of this objection is that reliability and availability are in the service provider's hands. One sample is the service disruptions experienced by Salesforce.com customers in December 2005 and January 2006. In line with this outages, the company launched a running accounts and history of system status at trust.salesforce.com. Nonetheless, some customers cancelled their subscription, not only because of the outage but also because of the so-called repeated system slowdowns.

BEA announced its BEA Project Sierra named, Liquid Computing, at the company's 2004 eWorld conference. An amalgam of current and future BEA technologies centering on Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA), Liquid Computing is basically the company's answer to the On Demand initiative of IBM. In other words, Liquid Computing, a vision of an SOA-based enterprise application infrastructure that will dynamically adapt to shifting business demand, is primarily a marketing concept. Not that technology-driven BEA has any shortage of interesting stuff to back up its vision. One week before eWorld, the company unveiled its Beehive Project, an open source implementation of the run-time container underlying WebLogic Workshop. The eWorld show also saw the formal announcement of Alchemy, a collection of technologies for mobile application development and deployment, and Quicksilver, a Web services-based enterprise services bus. Last but not least, a new Process Edition of WebLogic Server will draw on the platform's integration capabilities to enable composite application development. The problem for BEA is threefold. First, Liquid Computing's exaltation of SOA may be right but with IBM and Microsoft in the game, their technology sounds imitative. Second, with the exception of WebLogic Server Process Edition, none of the technologies announced at eWorld has a definite ship date. More difficult is that slumping licenses and stock value have put BEA under pressure and raised expectations that eWorld could not meet.