Concept of Product and Service

Business offers means in the market to the customer to attain satisfaction. A means can be of two types: product or service. A product is a tangible, physical item, such as a text book, or material. A service is a intangible means such a consulting, medical test etc. In the contemporary market there may be millions of products and services offered. Here some ways in which service can be described

• Services are deeds, processes and performances.
• "Service can be bought and sold but which can not be dropped on your foot" (source not known)

Online Docs

Document is a piece of work that your write and keep on a computer. Documents have become an essential component of modern life. Computer software that enables an individual to create and maintain a document is called word processor. Some of the well known word processing software includes proprietary Microsoft Word and open source OpenOffice. Traditionally word processing software is to be installed on the machine and documents are created and stored on user machine or some secondary device such as CD or pen drives. However, with the advent of Web, it is now possible to use word processor services directly from web servers (without installing them on user machines) and also store them on the web. This form of service is called cloud service and here servers supply the application packages and user generated data such as documents are stored on data centers. Such a document which is created using a cloud service and managed – edited, formatted, printed, and shared directly from the web is called a online document or online docs.

• Forms of documents:Earlier documents were contained mainly text. However, current documents may in addition to contain picture, sound, video, audio and animation are usually referred to as multimedia documents. In addition, presentations and spread sheets are also considered documents.
• Online documents services:
  Some of the well known online docs services include
  Google Docs
  Zoho Show
  Animoto

What is orientation?

Understanding the term orientation is first step towards studying SOA. The term has different connotations. Here are some of them.

• Orientation means direction For instance, an orientation program in cloud computing means, it is a program in which audience is directed towards considering "cloud" as a new approach.
• Orientation also means " focus". For instance, when we say currently our orientation is towards "saving power" we mean we are focused on "saving power".
• Orientation means " concern" or " aim". For instance market-oriented activity or job oriented course.
• Another meaning of orientation is using some paradigm as basis for building something. For instance " objected oriented programming" is a programming approach in which " object" paradigm is central to everything. In this case orientation means certain implications. For example, in OOPS, objects. methods and messages are directly implied.

What is service?

The purpose of business to provide products and services for its customers. In general products are "tangible" things such as "car", soap" or "book" etc. For large part of 19th century business was dominated by product offering. Only in the second half of 2oth century Service became major business component and economic drivers. In fact, current economy is called " service economy" meaning major business transactions involve service offering. Services are "intangible" offering such as "consultancy", "transportation" etc.

In the context of IT business and with the wide spread adoption of web as a major business front, service has gained a broader meaning. For instance, when we use an email such as Gmail/hotmail we are using a "service".

SOA: Indian companies welcome

Indian companies are catching with new business paradigm Service oriented architecture(SOA). According to a recent survey many of the companies have moved from exploration stage to deployment phase in their SOA journey. It has moved from planning and pilot stages to new and encouraging deployment phase. The companies are adopting both ways of shopping for SOA suites and doing a product evaluation within each SOA product category. The leading SOA suites providers are Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. The factors that are driving companies towards SOA way include internal IT integration and third part integration. However, data confidentiality and auditability remained the biggest concerns for moving towards SOA and eventually adopting cloud computing technologies. Other concern that are bogging down a faster adoption of cloud computing services are performance unpredictability ,data transfer bottlenecks and data lock-in issues.

Service Oriented Architecture: Philosophy

Service Oriented architecture(SOA) is a new programming philosophy. Its aim is to seperate data and code creation from the beginning. By doing so, it lets programmer to write code to consume or use data from anywhere and allows data to be used imaginatively by other programmers with bothering to create data for thier programs. Here is an example.

Programmers at http://housingmaps.com/ use data from two different sources. One from http://craiglist.com/ and Google Maps to create a new offering. The new offering or service combines the data from these two sources i.e real estate data from http://craiglist.com/ and map data from Google Maps. The combintation offers a more visual presentation that help buyers to make more informed decision.

input 1: http://craiglist.com/

input 2: http://maps.google.com/

Output is: http://housingmaps.com/

Points to Note:

• Please note that housingmaps does not own any data at all. Nor does it going to create any data for itself. All it does is to access data from two sources.
• Neither the googlemaps nor craiglist can do this service on thier own.

This kind of services ( also known as Maspup) are possible because programmer at housingmaps can consume data generated by others. This is an example of Service oriented architecture (SOA)