There has been a lot of press over the last year about cloud computing.  Web-based applications like Salesforce.com have demonstrated the utility and cost-effectiveness of cloud-based resources.  Integration vendors have also begun providing products designed for the cloud.  Like the few other cloud-based integration products, the XAware engine can be installed and run in a cloudcomputing environment. This architecture lets you avoid local infrastructure investments, and is most beneficial when you need to integrate data sources and applications involving other cloud-based or SaaS resources (not all resources are premise-based). If you are using SaaS or other internet-based resources, placing an integration component like XAware on the internet makes sense. It makes less sense if all your application components are premise-based, depending on performance requirements.  This latter scenario would have multiple premise-based components contributing data to a cloud-based integration application, where the data is combined and transformed, then sent back into premise-based resources. Only a few types of integration applications can afford the performance cost of such a round-trip to/from the cloud.

If you're interested in experimenting with XAware in the cloud, you might read the new Wiki article on installing the XAware engine in Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment . This environment lets you pay for hardware and software resources as you go, providing a very cost-effective and flexible environment for many integration applications.