Lately I've been hearing of a lot of ERP vendors making references to their dominance in the SOA area. Okay, their future dominance in the SOA area. Indeed, SAP just rattled their saber according to Joe McKendrick's blog.

"Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, about SAP's emerging SOA strategy, who promised that SAP would be leading the enterprise SOA market by the end of 2007."

That's so, 1995. Indeed, if the ERP guys understood anything about SOA they would know that there is no way they can lead that market because it's all about systemic change to the enterprise, not layering in more processes, services-enabled ERP systems, or middleware. This kind of stuff drives me nuts.

Don't get me wrong, ERPs have value and SAP has a good one. However, at the end of the day SAP is all about buying business processes, not the interconnection of those processes/services, and certainly not about working and playing well with other processes/services, no matter how many complex stacks and charts you can put in front of me.

However, they could have the effect of freezing the market for a bit, as SAP loyalists wait and figure out where their "SOA platform" will go. That will only damage those companies, if you ask me. When they finally get with reality, they will be a year or two behind...and that's like being an hour 1 late to a marathon, and expecting to win. To some extent, this as already occurred.

So, here's my advice to the ERP companies:

1. Focus on what role you'll play in most SOAs. Don't focus on being the entire stack. It won't work, and you'll look silly trying.
2. Service-enabled your platform so it works and plays well with other technology, and provide tools for tweaking if it does not.
3. Understand that you'll now be competing with other enterprise services and composite applications providers, and in many instances you'll see some of your services being pushed out of the way for processes or services that are a better fit for your customer.

And, here's my advice to the ERP users:

1. Always consider the role your existing ERP and CRM applications will play within your SOA. Keep to the strategy, make sure to understand your own issues, and then look for the technology that fits.
2. Test the service interfaces now before you get too far down the road with some assumptions.
3. Communicate with your ERP and CRM vendors as to what their issues are in the context of your SOA, if any.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on December 8, 2006 06:11 AM