As these applications become core to many businesses, so does the need to incorporate these applications into our existing infrastructure and figure out how they fit into our SOA strategy. Moreover, how are they going to work and play well together? At the end of the day, they should function like any other enterprise application, both housing and sharing critical business information as well as services.

However, these on-demand applications have the potential to become the Mother of All SOAs, that is, if the vendors get together and figure this out. Think about it. You have access to thousands of services with a single on-demand application provider, as well as information, schemas, etc., and the same patterns found in other on-demand application providers as well.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the creation of an SOA on top of these applications, including process/orchestration layers, directory services layers, identity management, monitoring, semantic management, etc., would add a tremendous amount of value considering the use of those applications, and abstraction into real business solutions. Indeed, we could find that many SOAs for many businesses actually exist outside of their firewalls, making their on-demand applications work and play well together.

Considering the importance of this emerging concept, I'm going to spend the next 3 or 4 columns discussing the ins and out of leveraging On-Demand Applications (ODAs), and creating a strategy, including technology and standards, to make these ODAs work and play well together. We'll discuss the patterns of use, as well as integration strategies, and tactical solutions including existing integration solutions for ODAs, emerging standards, and perhaps standards that need to emerge.