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Does SOA consolidation run counter to basic SOA Philosophy?
Much of the success of SOA and Web Services technologies has been driven by the benefits of loose coupling and easy interoperability of different services. The SOA philosophy allows and encourages a best-of-breed approach in selecting and combining services. And because of the modularity and building-block approach, many think that SOA will challenge large monolithic applications, like ERP, that have dominated the business horizon for the last decade.
But it’s ironic that the success of SOA has led to vendor consolidation in the SOA tool space and the creation of suites of developer tools for building out SOA. “The SOA mega-suite is too un-SOA in philosophy,” Ron Schmeltzer of ZapThink commented. Big vendors like Oracle, IBM, and HP have embraced SOA and introduced SOA tool suites, combining technologies like Web Services, ESBs, Governance, and Registry/UDDI. Meanwhile smaller companies are consolidating to create comprehensive suites around SOA too. Progress Software, for example, has acquired and combined the Sonicwall ESB with Actional’s Web Services Management.
Consolidated suites have the advantage of providing a tested bundle of software, but they may suffer from the same sort of weakness that SOA seeks to root out.
