With many things leading up to this, today Salesforce.com announced that they are indeed now an on-demand SOA solution, considering the capabilities of their Apex platform, new and existing. This includes adding new capabilities such as an add-on to its Apex development environment that allows users to access external web services. Their on-demand platform has been evolving for some time now, and now they are mo With many things leading up to this, today Salesforce.com announced that they are indeed now an on-demand SOA solution, considering the capabilities of their Apex platform, new and existing. This includes adding new capabilities such as an add-on to its Apex development environment that allows users to access external web services. Their on-demand platform has been evolving for some time now, and now they are moving into the SOA space with an offering that’s both disruptive and innovative. I’m not sure too many out there saw “SOA on-demand” coming, but if anybody can pull it off Salesforce.com can. “Santa Clara, Calif. – Salesforce Developer Conference — May 21, 2007 – Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced Salesforce SOA, taking service oriented architectures on demand for the first time. Salesforce SOA will deliver SOA as a service, heralding the end of complex and expensive software-based SOA solutions for intelligent Web services integration. Salesforce SOA is a powerful new capability of the Apex programming language that will allow developers to focus on innovation, not infrastructure, while building a new class of on-demand applications. Salesforce SOA was unveiled and demonstrated today at the Salesforce Developer Conference.” “Salesforce SOA will provide the ability to mashup salesforce.com’s multi-tenant on-demand service with enterprise workflow and business processes to enable new kinds of enterprise applications on demand. As a new capability of the Apex programming language, Salesforce SOA will enable SOA-based business processes, such as enterprise applications, to be created, maintained and leveraged on demand. SOA business processes will become virtual and sharable, and benefit from the scalability and agility of the on-demand model. With Salesforce SOA, developers will be able to: Use Apex to build SOA applications that integrate to Web services from billing, inventory or order entry systems. Call out to internal Web services such as Oracle Financials and SAP Order Management, and external Web services such as FedEx, Hoovers and Yahoo!. Build rich applications on-demand for any business process” The multi-tenant Salesforce Platform provides a feature set for building business applications such as models and objects to manage data, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, the Salesforce API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and the Apex programming language. This is the first step of many that Salesforce.com will take to drive their on-demand platform further into the market. It just makes logical sense when you consider that they are a huge service provider, and the masses are leveraging salesforce.com for their business processes delivered through a subscription-based service. Now, you can take those processes and services and bind them to process and services inside your enterprise, between your customers and partners, and do so using an SOA infrastructure that you also leverage using a subscription service. It’s also an application development platform, allowing you to create and integrate your own on-demand business applications. Those that will leverage “Salesforce SOA” now will include current Salesforce.com subscribers that need to integrate their internal processes and services with Salesforce.com, and build new businesses processes and new application functionality as well. They will find this approach more cost effective. As the Salesforce.com SOA stacks gets more mature and better known Salesforce.com may find that “Salesforce SOA” users, many who are not current Salesfroce.com subscribers, will be leveraging “Salesforce SOA” as an inexpensive way to get into the world of SOA, and I think that if they are successful using the SOA platform, most will stay. Finally, larger organization may found that “Salesforce SOA” is mother of all SOAs when it comes to binding enterprises together to form value chains, or even integrating distributed companies into a single collection of services, using “Salesforce SOA” as a mechanism for central interoperability, as well as service and process exchange. Moreover, the world of mashups is exploding and this platform is perfect for supporting a mashup creation platform on-demand. It will be interesting to see how the larger SOA stack players react to this announcement. Now, SOA architects, developers, process designers have a less expensive way to build, deploy, orchestrate, and manage services using a holistic, single source stack. The best-of-breed players will actually benefit from this technology. You still need bit players to bring it into the enterprise, abstracting and managing data movement, interfacing with core systems, and even building SOAs that interact with an on-demand SOA such as this. Clearly, market changing technology. Software Development