Late in May Salesforce.com announced their offering of a new product, Salesforce SOA. It is being offered as part of its new platform and development language called Apex. Salesforce has positioned their Apex-based SOA solution as being much simpler and less expensive than traditional web services integration. Any Apex application will immediately be able to be used as an SOA component.
Salesforce hopes that by combining SOA with SaaS that they can create a new class of application that can be easily mixed and matched with complementary applications running within the Salesforce infrastructure. They hope to provide developers and business analysts with powerful tools for easily creating new business processes and applications.
Salesforce will now host SOA-based business processes that can be created and used on-demand. The new model promises to encourage reuse and sharability. And Salesforce’s on-demand platform will ensure scalability and agility.
Salesforce SOA will enable:
- Integration. Make it easy to consume any existing web service, such as from billing, inventory or order entry systems.
- Access to both Internal and External Systems. This includes internal systems like those of Oracle Financials or SAP as well as external systems like FedEx or Hoovers.
While the combination of SaaS with SOA is compelling, Salesforce will have a difficult task in convincing enterprises to shed much of their existing infrastructure in favor of a much leaner one, but one where the enterprise may not have as much control.
[...] Un’altra forma di SaaS è l’offerta, sul web, di applicazioni complete (CRM, HR, …) a beneficio, sopratutto, di PMI o di quelle imprese caratterizzate da un alto numero di filiali e da un’insufficiente presenza di personale IT. Solitamente su queste applicazioni i produttori tendono ad ideare framework per permettere ai consumatori di sviluppare servizi di business o processi da utilizzare nelle loro composizioni interne (un esempio), ponendo le basi per una SOA oltre i firewall. Altri autori sullo stesso argomento: [...]