Salesforce moves into hosted SOA

Salesforce hopes that its hosted SOA will follow in the footsteps of its CRM product

Salesforce.com is preparing to unveil a web-based service oriented architecture (SOA) platform later today at its Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California. 

A preview of the platform is scheduled for availability by September and will be available on a subscription basis in a similar way to the firm's customer relationship management (CRM) service.

Salesforce did not release pricing information nor a projected launch date for the final product.

SOAs offer a way to build componentised business applications, allowing firms to build a capability such as single sign-on or currency conversion and reuse it across several applications.

The programming technique borrows heavily from the world of web services, which allow companies to share data between departments and with partners in a standard way.

Salesforce touted its hosted SOA as a way to integrate web services with billing, inventory and order entry systems, as well as connect with web services from enterprise applications from vendors such as Oracle and SAP.

The SOA market is dominated by data and system integration players such as BEA's Aqualogic, IBM's WebSphere and Tibco. 

These vendors offer server products that manage service life cycles, repositories that offer developers an overview of all available services, or governance tools that track development progress and the adoption of services.

Salesforce did not specify which SOA management services it will offer, but highlighted the fact that users will be able to access the services as a hosted platform.

The firm hopes that hosted SOA will follow in the footsteps of its CRM product and appeal to businesses looking to save on software licensing, hardware and maintenance fees for traditional software.

"It is non-disruptive. You do not have to invest lots of money in hardware and software and dedicated skills to bring this all together," René Bonvanie, director of Salesforce's AppExchange, told vnunet.com.

The absence of lofty hardware and software requirements has long been a selling point for Salesforce, which has always tried to bring about "the end of software" though the development of software-as-a-service models.

Aside from the CRM service, Salesforce also runs AppExchange, an online marketplace for services built with the company's Apex programming language.

Bonvanie explained that the SOA system will use Apex and offer developers access to the AppExchange to sell custom add-ons and applications.

"The beauty of this model is that you can buy and build and integrate as much as you want," he said.

Brad Shimmin, a principal analyst at Current Analysis, suggested that the combination of hosted software with an SOA platform is the "perfect marriage of two very different ideas".

Salesforce has been offering APIs that allow developers to hook up software to Salesforce's online platform, but SOA provides a higher level of integration, the analyst argued.

Shimmin does not expect Salesforce to compete directly with traditional SOA platform vendors, but that customers will use the services to unlock data from the Salesforce platform and share it throughout their enterprise network.

However, Salesforce might have a challenge in attracting an audience to the software, according to Ron Schmelzer, founder of analyst firm Zapthink.

CRM software is traditionally sold to salespeople looking for a suite that requires minimal set-up. The company has attracted some developers with its Apax hosting platform, but has limited traction in the application integration field.

"Salesforce could do it, but it remains to be proven. But the model is pretty interesting," Schmelzer commented.

He expects other companies to join the hosted SOA market, with Google and Amazon as the most likely candidates.

Microsoft is already offering hosted composite services through its BizTalk Hosting Services that are part of Windows Live.