Design Aspects of Software as a Service to Enable E-Business through Cloud Platform

As a typical form of Cloud service, Software as a Service(SaaS) has been leading the adoption of Cloud to enable e-Business by the industries. There are growing number of SaaS services which could provide different aspects of capability enabling business to leverage Cloud platform to run and manage business processes, such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, finance and accounting. However the design aspects of building effective SaaS services and corresponding platform to enable e-Business have not been studied before to guide research and development activities from both business and technical perspectives. This paper studies the reference models, architecture and related technical implications of SaaS value chain and operation models, etc. Sample applications and related technical solutions are summarized to demonstrate how these patterns could be instantiated in real business environment.