Service-orientated architecture: reducing the cost of change (page 2 of 2)

It is critical that customers learn to distinguish between these different levels of commitment.

There are an increasing number of vendors who truly enable SOA... but there are far more vendors who have service-oriented their product architectures in order to jump on the SOA bandwagon, and yet offer products that are not particularly useful for enabling SOA.

Oracle, who has fully-embraced SOA, already enjoys a strong presence in the middleware market through its Oracle Application Server 10g platform. By directly embedding integration functionality into its Application Server 10g product, Oracle is focusing its middleware strategy on SOA.

Oracle's platform, being simpler to develop, understand, deploy, and manage, resonates with IT organisations looking to reduce deployment expenses. Oracle's application experience gives it first hand insight into what an SOA means for integrating applications and business processes.

In conclusion, SOA is no longer an abstract concept. Indeed, as this range of analyst insight and customer evidence testifies, SOA is real and is happening now.

It remains to software vendors to engineer products that help customers unlock the many benefits this technology will deliver - and for customers to identify vendors that have really embraced this exciting new approach to enterprise architecture, rather than hijacking the latest acronym for marketing purposes.