Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

48 Chapter 3 Defining the Clouds for the Enterprise
How will money be made from providing APIs for free You have to consider
that most of the content on the Web is free to the browser user. Business
models are driven in other ways, such as by advertising revenue. In other cases,
sites that offer data for free to the browsers are simply providing the data using
another mechanism. Thus, there are more ways to leverage the data directly
within other applications or mashups. It is logical to expect that most of the
more popular data-as-a-service APIs will remain free or available at a very low
fee. After all, while the use of Web APIs expands, the key is adoption and leveraging,
and the money will come down the road for those who find their APIs
pervasively embedded within enterprises or clouds, through enterprise usage
fees—in essence, the same way those who create freeware make money today.
Eventually, you will see fees for information delivered via APIs that you
would pay to see within a browser. Moreover, there are complex business services
and data, delivered as APIs, that may actually have to charge large fees
right away considering the limited audience and the costs of development and
support. However, they will typically be much cheaper than having to develop
those services and maintain that data yourself. We do not see many of these
types of services yet, but as the world of the nonvisual Web expands, more of
them will show up on the market.
Should the possibility of future fees affect your development efforts A
better question might be, How did the possibility of future fees related to
expanding your business onto the Internet affect your business Be aware of
their potential, but also be aware of the benefits.
You also need to consider proprietary issues—APIs that cause “lock-in,”
or the inability to leverage other APIs in its place because the interface it leverages
does not exist anywhere else. As with database-as-a-service offerings, you
have to consider the downsides to proprietary interfaces that do not allow you
to easily move to other APIs.
Process-as-a-Service
Process-as-a-service refers to a remote resource that can bind many resources
together, either hosted within the same cloud computing resource
or remotely, to create business processes (see Figure 3.5). An example would