LiteBytes from Lustratus Research

Microsoft moves into SOA as a Service

Microsoft recently made two SOA related announcements:  The next version of Biztalk will have a SOA veneer (commented on by Joe McKendrik ) and more interestingly Microsoft will lauch a  Software as a Service(SaaS) SOA offering. 

I blogged previously about how SaaS itself increases the requirement for integration as multiple SaaS based applications must be integrated together.  This has the potential to derail SaaS initiatives – particularly in smaller organisations without sufficient IT skills and budget to deliver on an integration strategy (SOA based or otherwise). 

Microsoft is taking a different angle on the SOA and SaaS story by focusing on cross-department integration and attempting to solve particularly painful aspects of the problem with SaaS offerings that will be called collectively Biztalk Services.  In essence, each service hits a specific integration issue which would otherwise require a potentially large investment in infrastructure.  The first two are:

• Identity: allowing management of users across departments and organisations and
• Connectivity: providing enterprise style message (pub-sub for instance) across the internet with appropriate security – thus making ‘safe’ exposure of a SOA service across multiple organisations.

Their picks of identity and connectivity for the first two services is smart as both are inevitably part of any cross-departmental SOA project.  The strategy is also smart as it neatly leverages where Microsoft is already strong (at the department level and in SMB) and where the SOA skills shortage is hitting hardest. 

As such I don’t think it is necessary to look at this announcement through Google-tinted glasses and disagree with Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink who is quoted as saying:

"I think Microsoft is really rethinking a lot of their server infrastructure because Google is a competitive threat,"

Microsoft is not doubt thinking hard about Google but it is only fair to point out that this is not a market where Google is relevant as yet and it is not a new departure for Microsoft or even Biztalk:  Biztalk was originally about internet-based integration as this article from 2000 shows.

Ronan

Sofware as a service (SaaS) and the new frontier of integration

A report quoted in Computer Weekly at the end of June found that 17% of SMBs are using more than 1 application delivered as a service.  This, as the article notes, brings the problem of integration back into the frame.  However, the problem is a tougher one in the sense that SMB are typically not equipped with IT departments capable of handling integration projects and are cost averse. 
One approach is to rely on your SaaS application vendor to do the integration for you.  As Mike West of the firm that produced the report, Saugatuck, puts it:

“If you're exclusively on a platform like Salesforce.com and using Salesforce.com plus other cooperating companies on AppExchange, they have their own platform that offers integration," West said.

Or to put it another way, rely on a single integrated stack from a single vendor – which sounds rather similar to the old enterprise software vendor approach.  For the same reasons as larger enterprises don’t put all their applications in a single vendor’s basket (functionality mismatch, over-dependence on a single supplier), many firms going the SaaS route will probably want to mix and match SaaS offerings from multiple vendors or combine in-house applications with SaaS.  While SaaS vendors do claim to provide integration hooks, this simply brings them back up to the same mark as in-house hosted applications.  This isn’t any more daunting than the other integration issues facing large organisations –and fit well into SOA programmes.

However, for smaller organisations this may be new territory and they are faced with two alternatives:

• Do the integration in house as part of a SOA strategy for instance suffers from the problems I covered last time around the lack of support for development life cycle.  For larger organisations with sufficient in house IT expertise, this may be acceptable.  For smaller ones, it is a far from simple decision.  And the decision becomes exponentially more important and potentially painful as the number of applications to be integrated increases the problem exponentially. 
• Alternatively, you can go to a third party integration SaaS which offers to host the integration logic for you - such as BT (among others) has offered since last year.

Deciding which to go for will require a significant investment of time and effort as the decision will have far reaching consequences.

Ronan