I'm on my way to STARwest in Disneyland, CA today, and since it's been a little while since my last software quality-focused conference, I'm particularly interested to see how these testing experts and vendors are addressing the needs of a more distributed computing environment. Our own expert Rajeev Gupta is coming in to present "Building the SOA Quality Center of Excellence".

Joe McKendrick recently posted, CTO Predicts SOA Will Fade into SaaS.  He quoted Ron Huxter, CTO of the provincial government of Ontario, “Over the last ten years, we’ve got most of the common business practices identified. The issues that we’re coming into now are sourcing the actual services -- in two to three years, SOA will fade into yet another sales banner like everything else has and it will transform into software-as-a-service (SaaS).” Ron acknowledges that new issues in cost structures and security will go along with this transition.

Joe concluded that, “Every paradigm, every change that sweeps the IT space promises greater integration, ease of use, and cost efficiencies. However, they also introduce new vulnerabilities that need new types of solutions. The rise of SOA, and now melding with cloud computing, is no exception.”

This is certainly the case, whether or not SOA is a leading indicator of SaaS.  However, it will take a while for SaaS in a Cloud Computing model to catch up with SOA  (see ReadWriteWeb’s post -  Fastest Growing US Companies are Rapidly Adopting Social Media for a presentation of this particular Gartner Hype Curve.) One obstacle for the pure plays in the cloud to join SOA is to recognize and deal with the increased testing and validation of data from even more diverse sources, as well as the governance and validation of all the underlying technologies that contribute to specific business outcomes.