If you've been monitoring my career, as well as my postings, you already know that I'm bullish on SaaS, and SOA, and I see the two merging as complementary concepts. Indeed, we're now seeing SaaS companies move into the platform space, selling beyond enterprise applications into databases, application development, integration, and even operating systems, all on demand. Case in point is this release by Salesforce If you’ve been monitoring my career, as well as my postings, you already know that I’m bullish on SaaS, and SOA, and I see the two merging as complementary concepts. Indeed, we’re now seeing SaaS companies move into the platform space, selling beyond enterprise applications into databases, application development, integration, and even operating systems, all on demand. Case in point is this release by Salesforce.com, outlining their new on demand platform that provides many core app dev and SOA tools, and does so on demand. “‘Salesforce Platform Edition heralds the arrival of salesforce.com as a platform company as well as an applications company,’ said Marc Benioff, salesforce.com chairman and CEO. ‘With Salesforce Platform Edition, customers can now easily extend the power, usability and success of on demand to every part of their enterprise. ISVs can deliver their applications to run directly on the Salesforce Platform Edition—allowing our customers to manage and share all of their information on demand.'” You should check out their white paper, which can be found here. An on demand platform supports multi-tenancy. In contrast to single-tenant counterparts, multi-tenant platforms share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained. Individual customer deployments are unique, separate, and secure within this shared multi-tenant platform, and run a single code base that is shared by all users and upgraded simultaneously. So, why should you care? Well, this does indeed change the games of both enterprise architecture and SOA. It does not change the core concepts, but the fact that as an option, you can obtain the use of the key technology on demand, through a subscription, and thus at a fraction of the buy-in price we’re paying now for software and hardware we host on our own. This means that SMBs can be on an equal playing field in the world of SOA, as compared to the Global 2000 who can spend the big bucks on the big SOA vendors. Moreover, an on demand platform also provides a single location for sharing services and tools, single global repository and directory, and the ability to get out of the constant struggle and expense of keeping your software and hardware stack current. Again, this does not change the core notion of SOA, only the ways to deploy it. This could make SOA much more affordable and easier to implement, also allow resources to be shared on demand. Those are good things. Software Development