How I explained SaaS to my wife

Wife: You've been staring at that screen for ages.  What are you doing?

Me: Thinking about writing a post on SaaS.

Wife: On what?

Me: Software As A Service.

Wife: Is that what you were telling me about the other day?  Service-oriented thingy?

Me: Service-oriented Architecture.  Yeah, it's similar, but instead of little services which you can use to build your program, you get a whole program as a service.  Imagine Excel on the internet - or the "cloud" as it's being called - you don't have to install it on your computer, you just go on the internet to use it.

Wife: The internet?  Isn't that slow? 

Me: It can be, so you need to be careful what kind of programs you do this with.  For instance, there's a company called SalesForce who offer a Customer Relationship Management program via SaaS.  Companies use it because it saves them having to install and manage lots of computers to put this big program on.

Wife: Interesting...

Me: Are you being sarcastic again?

Wife: No, not at all.  I'm just wondering if they do HaaS?

Me: What?

Wife: Husband As A Service.  I still need that light upstairs fixed.

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SOA API ESB SAAS PAAS Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web 4.0

Interconnectivity is great, isn't it?  :)

Joking aside, we're still trying to recover from the rampant spaghetti architectures we have let evolve in our enterprises.  Let's not repeat these mistakes as we seek everything in the web to be interconnectable.  Cloud ESBs are an interesting development in this space, since they offer the promise of easy integration as well as loose-coupling, which surely has to be key to all of this.

With great power comes great responsibility...

SOA ESB SAAS PAAS Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Web 3.0 Web 4.0

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What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is fundamentally about enabling software to be constructed from a network of "services", so when I first encountered the SaaS (Software as a Service) acronym I assumed it was marketing hype for the same thing.

It isn't.

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SaaS and J(2)EE

Introduction

Multitenancy refers to the architectural principle whereby a single instance of software runs on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor’s servers, whilst serving multiple client organizations (tenants). This is in contrast to multi-instance architecture where separate software instance or hardware systems are set up for different client organizations. in other words, under a multitenant architecture, applications are required to virtually partition data and configuration so that each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance. Customization typically includes aspects like user interface branding, access control, data and configuration, workflow, etc

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