Of course, the consolidation continues in the SOA space, and the rumors and published releases around Oracle's bid for BEA is the latest buzz. While the bloggers and reporters have been going nuts around this news item, the larger issues don't seem to be getting the same consideration. Perhaps, because it's more "real world" than "hype." We love hype, we don't like reality as much, when it comes to SOA.

BEA has been a player in the SOA space for some time now, and they are big enough to have an influence, but not too big where the larger guys can't afford them. So, Oracle, or the other "big stack" players, was likely to take a run at them. Oracle is out of the gates first.

A few things to consider around this:

• The big stack players become bigger, and this is likely to continue. The big guys know that the more tech they have in their bags, the more money they can make in the emerging SOA marketplace. So, they keep buying companies because you guys keep buying big stacks. Remember VDA?
• This always puts a question mark after the technology that's being acquired. Will it be supported long term? What is the migration and assimilation strategy?
• Are the "big stack" guys getting too big, and thus diluting their core SOA offering?
• Where does this leave the best-of-breed approaches?

SOAs are architectures, and not products. So, no matter how much technology is acquired and put into an offering, that does not make it an architecture that you can buy. So, I'm always a bit put off by "complete SOA solution" or "total SOA offering." SOA is a solution that meets the needs of the enterprise/business. If they don't understand my enterprise/business, how can they say they have a "total solution"? They can't.

So, you always go business, to requirements, to models, to technology, to solution, and the technology is typically going to be a lot of different stuff, and typically should not be a static stack, where some technology could be a fit, but the other parts are forced. No one size fits all, sorry to break that to you…again.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on October 18, 2007 06:04 AM