The way business applications are evolving, enterprises are learning to accept and embrace the notion of applications that they neither control nor host. Now enterprises are leveraging applications that run a business through the Internet platform. As these applications become core to many businesses, so does the need to incorporate these applications into the enterprise’s existing infrastructure and make them work together. Every on-demand application should function like any other enterprise application, both hosting and sharing critical business information as well as services.
SaaS-based on-demand applications continue to grow at a staggering rate. According to software market analyst Gartner, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) represented approximately 5 percent of business software revenue in 2005 and, by 2011, 25 percent of new business software will be delivered as SaaS. Large players like Salesforce.com and NetSuite as well as more traditional applications continue to jump on this on-demand bandwagon. The wide variety of SaaS vendors specializing in different areas has resulted in fragmented enterprise information, thus the demand for stitching together information from these different sources is also increasing at a rapid pace.
