Chapter 10. Integrating BizTalk Server and Salesforce.com

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a trend in enterprise software that cannot, and should not, be ignored. Legitimate SaaS offerings provide a highly scalable, reliable, and configurable environment hosted outside your organization. Unlike traditional Application Service Providers (ASP)&;, SaaS providers leverage a multi-tenet, metadata-driven architecture that typically runs a single instance and version of the software for all users. This means that customers have no upfront infrastructure costs, see regular software updates without significant "upgrade projects", and are assured of a strong service-level agreement for application performance.

While we may adopt a SaaS product such as Salesforce.com for a particular solution, what do we do with the existing on-premises systems that house our critical information and algorithms? How do we share data between SaaS environments and on-premises sources? We will answer that question in this chapter.