BANGALORE, INDIA: It is about innovation and doing better. That is were Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Mashups services and Web 2.0 come in.

However, according to a recent report, these enterprise technologies fulfill only about 10 per cent of the requests.

Making a presentation on IT Empowering the Business with Agility and Innovation through SOA and SaaS, Mahesh Subramaniam, regional product manager, Serena Software, said, ``One must ask questions like can my EPR talk to the SCM system? To enable business means to write applications that can fulfill their needs."

SOA came into existence as a method of building applications using a collection of services that can operate through a loosely coupled communication. It also defines and provisions the IT infrastructure to allow different applications to exchange data and participate in business processes.

SOA separates functions into distinct units (services), which can be distributed over a network and can be combined and reused to create business applications. So what makes SOA different?

Subramaniam said: "Controlled access to the outside world and most of the work is done outside of the applications."

"Recently SOA was extended as WOA and what has happened is that portals, Mashups and business tolls are the SOA/WOA consumers. It can be extended further as you increase the complexity and extend it," he said.

"It is special, as it is a platform for innovation, " Subramaniam added.

SaaS will never go the ASP way and be termed as a failure because it addresses four points namely Multi-tentative; Subscription based; Scalability and Democracy/Transparency, he pointed out. Likewise, Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-oriented architecture.

Facebook and blogs are examples of Web 2.0 applications. "By bringing all these together, work of business processes based on SOA and interactivity can built a building block out of your applications to benefit your businesses,'' he added.

(manohars@cybermedia.co.in)