Communications Enablement of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Applications

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is an emerging software application delivery model. It has gained an increasing momentum, and it is being adopted at a very fast pace. However, the integration of SaaS applications with enterprise on-premise applications has become a major factor for the success of its adoption. There is a critical need for methods and communication infrastructures that can enable distributed SaaS applications over the data network. This paper presents an approach and a realization of communications enablement of SaaS applications. It focuses on three areas: 1) an approach to enabling communications as a service; 2) a SaaS adaptor framework for integrating SaaS applications with on-premise communications services; and 3) methods and communication middleware for two-way web services crossing enterprise domains. A communication enabled sales opportunity management SaaS application is implemented to verify the proposed approach. Experimental results indicated that the proposed approach is feasible and effective to communication enable SaaS applications in distributed environment that connects both cloud computing and enterprise on-premises systems.