Sales tax rates would be another such service. Again, an online business that had to apply the appropriate state sales tax would run the service as part of processing the transaction. Credit-card processing also lends itself to such a service. Menerva Technologies Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., provides a software platform to facilitate contract negotiations. Built as components with tools from Oracle, Menerva can deliver its functionality either as a service or an application.
Online exchanges offer our components as a service.
Right now, the earliest of the early adopters are using services where it makes sense and offers obvious efficiencies. Mainstream companies won't follow until there are some tested models for how to use services, attractive pricing, and tools to make the entire process easy. Independent software vendors will be the first to adopt services, packaging pieces of their application functionality as services. Although nobody has pinned down a formula for building a software service or converting existing components to services, it might not be very different from what IT is doing today with distributed components. The big thing is to get a really clean separation between business logic and presentation.