Solution delivery has undergone two significant paradigm shifts in the past few years. One is the notion of breaking down a solution into coarse grained services pushed by SOA, and the other is to deliver software as a managed service, pushed by SaaS. The former influenced the design and architecture of solutions. The latter offered a very effective alternate channel to distribute the software as a managed service, as opposed to the conventional license based model. What is not explored much so far is the synergies that the two offer if they were to co-exist in the solution architecture. This combined with Virtualization brings forth some interesting possibilities.

Enter Virtualization
The accelerator in the SOA SaaS synergies is the rapidly emerging third component, Virtualization. With ever increasing demands for dynamic computing environment there is always a need for additional hardware, CPU, memory or network bandwidth. Hitherto the only solution was to aquire new hardware. Today, Virtualization offers a good alternative, where multiple virtual machines can be created from a single underlying physical hardware.

Virtualization is a powerful capability where it allows having multiple logical hardware images on a single large physical image. It allows for creating a very flexible and scalable layer at both- the physical and the logical levels. So one large multi CPU machine can be made to look like multiple smaller machines in the logical layer. Or, many smaller machines can be made to look like a single large machine at the logical layer. More importantly, this allows for an application provisioning and getting additional local machines, on demand, in real time.

Even better, this virtual hardware needed for the application can be provisioned and accessed on demand and released with ease. Virtualization infrastructure can be created in the enterprise data centers or the same can be provisioned from web based virtualized platform service providers such as Amazon (EC2) or Google (App Engine). For solution providers, Virtualization offers a very good approach for dynamic scaling.

As virtualization becomes a reality in enterprise infrastructure, question of time before most IT solutions are available in the virtual enterprise computing platform.