Designing Models for Software as a Service in Cloud Computing

This paper details the case study of the model development at a company that offers software as a service (SaaS) to clients in the services industry. The growing market for SaaS provides the company tremendous opportunities to succeed as a startup. A new cloud-based system is aimed at facilitating the automation of cross-department collaboration by integrating company's Web applications to other service providers and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. However, as it is challenging to dynamically integrate multiple autonomous software systems, the company has identified Web services technologies as the foundation of the next generation software solutions. To create an extensible solution, Event-Driven Process Chain and Unified Modeling Language models are developed to model enterprise business processes and their departmental functions. The models are abstract views of complex enterprise systems. After the implementation of such models, the management team can further address issues related to the cost effectiveness, reliability and data security of software-supported business processes.