Will Vendors Really Do SOA?

Seeing the interest in SOA among their enterprise customers, many vendors are starting to rethink their own applications as a set of services, making them more modular and thus more easily updated incrementally. While some vendors' soa offerings may involve nothing more than repackaging their existing approaches and relabeling individual suite applications as services, many others see soa as a way to gain the same benefits for their internal development efforts that their Cio customers are beginning to see.

If software vendors adopt the SOA approach for their own products, they'll be able to more easily modify and add components - and thus deliver incremental services without requiring customers to undertake major upgrades.

The component approach favored in SOA should also help CIOs lower their software acquisition costs. that's because they'll only have to buy the specific services they need, not everything the vendor decides to bundle. It should also reduce vendors' development costs, which should also help reduce prices.

But the SOA approach also adds risk for software vendors: CIOs can invest in internal services or buy third-party services if they find a vendor's product to be deficient or overpriced. That makes it harder for vendors to sell suites with mediocre components. It also gives them an incentive to develop their SOA-based applications in a way that isn't so open and transparent.

Major enterprise application vendors like SAP AG, Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are developing SOA platforms and reworking their applications for an SOA framework. Each vendor's goal is to make its platform the preferred basis for deploying services, using its own applications as well as third-party services.

"They're all wining and dining the software vendors to foster an ecosystem," says Dennis Gaughan, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. All platforms are in early stages of development, but a common approach is to support the vendor's own interface standards to give an advantage to applications written specifically for that system. Software makers may also support industry-standard interfaces so companies can integrate vendor-neutral services from other providers or ones they create themselves.

You should watch vendors carefully to ensure that platforms advertised as SOA-based don't end up as proprietary systems in disguise, says Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink. Gaughan agrees, noting that "vendor self-interest can trump compatibility."

— Galen Gruman