There seems to be a move in the market towards Software As A Service (SaaS), for me this is really a case of the technology catching up with the requirement. Most people see the Service Oriented Architecture as a means to better integrate, SaaS is the obvious progression.

For me SaaS is nothing new, I helped to pioneer one of the only global supply chain B2B solutions in First4Farming http://www.first4farming.com. The principal behind First4Farming was initially around Business to Business trading in the Agriculture sector, but more focussed on the supply chain. Once we put the B2B in place we built a set of hosted services that could be leveraged by the community, this has been a huge success and it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to see it growing.

So what challenges are there in moving to a SaaS model? Well, in my opinion it is the same old integration problem, and it is compounded by the fact that customers wont run their entire business off SaaS applicaitons.

This leaves us with the same old integraiton problem, where we need to be able to extend the integration landscape both inside and ouside the firewall with legacy assets and SaaS hosted applications.

SOA will help us to deliver this seemless integration, as long as we choose the right platform to deliver it. I have seen moves in the market for integration as a service, this is offered by platforms such as BT Integrate (www.bt.com) which I have been involved with for a little while.