Scaling Down SOA to Small Businesses

The adoption of SOA in business computing environments is growing due to the promise of significant cost reduction in the planning, deployment and operation of IT projects. However, the organic transformation from legacy enterprise applications to SOA applications has occurred mostly in large enterprises. Small businesses have largely been left out of the SOA transformation. For small businesses and organizations, SOA is a mysterious technology little related with their business. This paper proposes a new way of scaling SOA services dubbed "outsidein" SOA that makes it possible for small business to enjoy the benefit of service orientation and service mashups to best fit their business needs. This "outsidein" SOA approach could unleash a SOA tsunami that will lead to the adoption of business-oriented Web services in a way similar to the adoption of the Web 2.0 that took place in the consumer market. This paper also demonstrates a few use cases how such a service delivery model could benefit small businesses and discusses the technical and social challenges of the adoption of this approach.