IT consumers and many traditional software companies truly do not understand the full nature of the transformation occurring in the industry.  It surprises me how many IT executives confuse the cloud with SaaS. SaaS is a business model and software channel which is better delivered through cloud technology in order to drive the right economics.  Architectural patterns that we use to construct good "software as service" solutions are not orthogonal to good software practice in general. The primary difference is that within SaaS models, some of this practice is not optional, including a good business plan, if you want to successfully get to market. 

The future of SaaS is still yet to be realized. In my view, SaaS models will potentially become the next wave of outsourcing where applications are combined at the business process level and delivered holistically to the consumer and/ or the consumer or the integrator will manage all the associated piece parts to construct the total solution. This virtual application construct is  the vision of SaaS. The “Cloud” is only a means to this end. The future  solutions will change how our customers will construct solutions to support their business. To some extent we are on the road to realizing the vision of the phrase coined in the early in the 90’s, "The network is the computer."

In the near future, we will start to see specialty services that are developed to be consumed through these service approaches across the cloud that will allow solutions to be created as a collection of a processes working in unison delivered from separate parties. Cloud automation and broker services need to start managing not only the deployment of virtual applications across clouds, but the construction of virtual applications across suppliers. These services will be easily decoupled and re- coupled allowing business a mean to adjust not only their business process but process supplier relationships.

We need to start understanding that traditional application servers are commodity items and will less a part of future IT spend.  The future are frameworks that support adoption to cloud models in terms  dynamic "horizontal" elasticity, resource isolation, and fault tolerance/ self healing to automation, billing and mufti-tenancy. Applications are simply better positioned, SaaS or not - if they are built with these elements in mind as a part of application design.

The underlying economic value inherent in the efficiency of these types of applications will drive down the cost of operating and deploying software. The winning next generation platform - Platform as a Service, will in affect, will become the new application server  of the future. Openness and integration especially to these different services, components, mash ups, etc. need to be managed in the context of a global application.  PaaS platforms will have to show how developers can adopt all these services easily within their application at a level of abstraction that will mitigate (not eliminate) the cost of lock-in. More importantly, PaaS vendors need to make the economic case for new software models presented by their solutions in contrast to other areas of IT spend and software investments.