SaaS and Web 2.0 are the new mantras, and once we recover from the financial crisis, these technology concepts will see a new birth. The hundreds of startups, service providers and hosting providers that are aggresively innovating new products and services will finally see the customer base they would have hoped for, if the economic issues had not put pretty much a stop on spending.

Web 2.0 is all about the free exchange of content. The content can be simple one line message (Twitter) to videos of all sizes (home videos on YouTube, targeted content at Break.com and Crackle, legal video on demand at Netflix and even the illegal video and music sharing sites like ….. ). However, is Web 2.0 just that?

It is also about the ability to take this content and create new content from it in new and innovative ways. Guess what, there is another word for that – “Mashups”. Thank GOD – not another TLA. Google Maps is probably the most used Web 2.0 concept that is exploited in mashups.

This multi-user, multi-device, ubiquitious way of information sharing is quickly becoming the next generation of the Internet.

SaaS is way of offering software over the web. Instead of making huge purchases of software and dealing with infrastructure and support issues, SaaS is a way to offer that over the Web. This is obviously putting it very simply! Guess what – that leads to yet another concept called Cloud Computing! We’ll talk about that in a later blog posting.

SaaS can be seen in various forms. The example most often cited is probably SalesForce.com. However, you can see SaaS offerings in almost every technology area – CRM, ERP, Identity Management/Security, Audit/Complaince, Content Management and even SaaS for custom business application – aka Compute and Storage Clouds like Amazon and Google. SaaS is also combined with Web 2.0 for content sharing like Google Docs and Microsoft Live.

Ok… so what happened to SOA. The real question to ask is would Web 2.0 and SaaS have existed without SOA?

I have to agree with the SOA skeptics in most cases. SOA as an enterprise architectural pattern has had mixed success. Any technologist will probably argue that the failure of SOA was not due to the fact that the technology architecture, tools/products to support SOA etc where wrong or not up to par. They went through their maturity cycles, and are now prime time ready.

However, the failure of SOA can be probably be attributed to the lack of a solid process understanding of how to implement SOA in an Enterprise. I have written enough about this…. (see my publications)

I would argue that the software architectural principles that existed since the inception of Computer Science, but highlighted using SOA as the buzz word, form the foundation that enabled the innovation around Web 2.0 and SaaS. Let’s chew on that……. thoughts… arguments……? I will do another post soon with some more thoughts beyond this bold (or not so bold) statement.