| There are two architectural models – commonly referred as SAAS Maturity models- that describe the transition of a service to what is called Multi-tenant efficient, highly scalable application. The SAAS Maturity model described by Microsoft has four distinct stages and is illustrated below. Another similar well-known model for SaaS-maturity is known as Forrester-model but adds another stage known as "Dynamic Business Apps-as-a-service". The three key Attributes of a SAAS Architecture: |
| Configurability: Metadata used to configure the way the application behaves for customers |
| Multi-tenant Efficiency: Maximizing the sharing of resources across tenants |
| Scalability: Maximizing concurrency, resource efficiency |
SAAS Simple Maturity Model (Microsoft, 2006) |
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| SaaS Maturity Model (Forrester, 2008) |
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ESB is another of these amorphous terms that means different things to different people. An ESB can be thought of as the next generation of Service Oriented Architecture. Everybody knows web services today, and they have been used extensively to allow companies to break the tyranny of proprietary architectures. Now you can wire applications to service providers without having to know or worry about the provider's underlying operating system or programming language. It is an architectural concept/construct - not a technology, despite some vendors (and even gartner) telling you otherwise. You'll find many different types of technology can fulfil the conceptual role of an ESB, hence be careful not to associate it with a particular technology. Therefore designing the architecture is more important than choosing a 'product'. An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is the "backbone" of the service-oriented architectural model which allows different protocols to be communica...
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