SOA meets open b-to-b integration

With all of the hubbub last week surrounding SCO’s pending demise and IBM’s open desktop play, you may not have noticed that the heavens have shifted just a tad.

No, it had nothing to do with this weekend’s autumnal equinox. That seems to happen every year about this time. What I’m talking about is the subtle shift within the realm of SOA, in which vendors (both open and closed source) seem to have suddenly discovered that SOA is as much about b-to-b integration as it is about modernizing and integrating systems that live inside the firewall. Call it a paradigm shift, a tipping point, a shakabuku or whatever you like. The SOA solar system has changed.

Earlier this year, Microsoft had the surprising foresight to begin a beta program in which the company would offer its BizTalk Server as a hosted integration server under the brand name BizTalk Services — yep, integration as a service (IaaS), not to be confused with the existing notion of infrastructure as a service.

Now, within the span of two short weeks, both BEA and MuleSource have also jumped headlong into this effort. BEA, which will focus on enabling and empowering SaaS (software as a service) providers through integration services, partnered with EnterConnect (a SaaS portal provider) to support that company’s SOAAPPS.com platform, which will offer SaaS and basic SOA installation capabilities.

MuleSource also partnered with a SaaS enabler for ISVs, OpSource, in a similar capacity. But MuleSource also (and more importantly) launched its own hosted IaaS offering, MuleOnDemand. Though still in beta, this service is the first of its kind: offering up a true ESB (enterprise service bus) for pure integration services “in the cloud.” The emergence of a hosted ESB solution (especially one based on open source) is akin to Jupiter shifting its orbit just enough to send thousands of icy bodies within the Ort Cloud (yes, pun intended) spiraling inward toward the sun. The solar system as we know it will no longer be the same.

One thing to note here is that although we’re talking primarily about IaaS as a means to employ SOA within a b-to-b environment, we shouldn’t forget that this approach is just as relevant for internal EAI efforts, especially for SMBs that do not have the means to install, configure, and maintain the infrastructure necessary to host an ESB. Smaller companies typically also lack the resources to employ a herd of consultants to build integration services on top of an on-premise ESB.

This isn’t to say that IaaS is better than SaaS. I don’t think that IaaS (my definition of it, that is) competes with SaaS in any way. In my mind, it is itself an implementation of SaaS that can also serve as an element within a typical SaaS solution — think Salesforce.com adding SOA-savvy message transformation and mediation capabilities to help customers connect on-premise ERP systems with its online CRM solution.

Whether b-to-b or EAI — and whether these hosted ESBs show up as a pure-play like MuleOnDemand or within an SaaS solution like Salesforce.com or a SOAAPPS.com — one thing is for sure: SOA will eventually find its way into intercompany communications much as it did into corporate environs, thanks to the ubiquity of J2EE. And open source will very likely lead the way here for similar reasons, but primarily because it is ISV-friendly, more so than closed source solutions. For example, it’s obviously more prohibitive financially for SaaS and IaaS providers to offer ESB-based SOA services using a closed source solution (as with the BEA and Microsoft), which would require a licensing partnership with the ESB vendor.

For this reason, I think it’s likely that we’ll see more SaaS/IaaS solutions and partnerships from open source vendors such as MuleSource, IONA, Red Hat, Sun (eventually), and WSO2. These vendors can offer top-notch software and support service subscriptions that are tuned to the SaaS subscription model. It’s a match made in the heavens, as it were.