Offering SaaS as SOA services

Abstract

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an approach in which software applications are delivered on demand to users as services. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising paradigm that allows companies that run their software on different platforms to interoperate among each other. The popularity of SaaS has been soaring since customers do not have to carry the burden of paying money upfront to purchase software licensing. The interest in using SOA to run different applications has been proliferating, especially since web services have started to implement SOA. Research is being conducted to observe how SOA can benefit SaaS. This paper presents an overview of SaaS, SOA and web services. Moreover, a new model is proposed to show how SaaS can be offered as SOA services. Furthermore, a real-life example is given to demonstrate the benefits of using the proposed model. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.