As hosted integration gets more sophisticated, customers can also begin developing process-based applications on the host’s
platform, an idea touted by Grand Central and by Salesforce.com with its sforce integration and application development platform.
In fact, most on-demand providers — including Amazon and eBay, notes Salesforce.com’s Benioff — seem headed in this direction.
Customers get a development environment in which they can create unique functionality that, unlike conventional enterprise
apps, won’t break when a new version arrives.
Although the host’s API limits the functionality of such applications, the potential for hosted application development doesn’t
stop with a handful of providers. As Eric Newcomer, CTO of enterprise integration company Iona, reminds us, one of the original
ideas behind Web services was that applications could be built from components published as services across the Internet.
“I think we’re seeing an increase in interest in getting the components instead of the whole package,” Newcomer says. He also
believes the reverse is true: Companies are trying to leverage their existing assets by service-enabling them and selling
them on a subscription or pay-per-use plan.
For outside-the-firewall integration of multiple services on behalf of a single customer, federated identity management must be in. Grand Central offers this in Version 5.0.
But Todd Johnson of Jamcracker, whose Pivot Path solution helps on-demand providers handle user provisioning, cautions that
properly integrating identity and security infrastructures among customers and hosted services is a tough problem — one that
defeated more than a few first-wave ASPs.
Always On?
In the end, the fear that an on-demand provider could fail remains the biggest single obstacle to large-scale enterprise adoption
of software as a service. One can argue, as Grand Central’s Minor does, that on-demand providers can afford to invest in redundancy
and uptime at levels individual enterprises can only dream of achieving. Maybe so, but customers must be confident that the
provider is doing everything right with its architecture, core technologies, security, and choice of partners.
IT has a natural resistance to losing control — and to losing personnel. “I think that there’s some fear, but I’m not sure
whether or not it’s a rational fear,” says Eric Peterson, site technology and operations analyst at JupiterResearch. “Out
of one side of its mouth, IT says, ‘We’re too busy; we don’t’ have enough people to get X and Y and Z done.’ But it [also]
says, ‘We don’t want to give up any of the software that we already own because it reduces the size of our kingdom.’ “
As usual, enterprise customers who see the merits of this paradigm shift — the first glimmers of utility computing — will
benefit most. Internet infrastructure has already taken over the heart of the enterprise, causing the line between inside
and outside the enterprise to blur. The physical locations of resources matter less and will fade progressively as technologies
such as SOA and federated identity become universal.
Meanwhile, a good application is a good application. If an enterprise can get most of the functionality of a great shrink-wrapped
solution through the browser with a magnitude less hassle and expense, IT can finally tuck into that backlog of important
projects.
And that may be the best job security of all.
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