SOA in Action

As I just reported over at my ZDNet blogsite: I received word that Progress Software -- in the news this week for its acquisition of integration tools vendor IONA -- has also acquired Mindreef, a provider of SOA service validation and testing environments.

MIndreef's value proposition is interesting: it provides a common platform and interface into the entire service lifecycle for any and all professionals involved in developing or using that service. Enterprise architects, integration specialists, developers, and managers alike to collaborate on service design and implementation.

No further details are available other than an FAQ on the Mindreef Website, so this seems to have been a quiet acquisition. (It's unclear even when the acquisition actually happened.) Mindreef says it and Progress will be hosting a Webcast in mid-July to discuss the acquisition, and direction of Mindreef's products, which include the SOAPscope quality and testing line.

Mindreef founder and CTO Frank Grossman is a technology visionary, so Progress is definitely adding a good team to its growing organization.

Thanks to MomentumSI's Jeff Schneider for alerting us to the news.

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Progress Software announced that it is acquiring IONA Technologies in a deal worth about $162 million.

Progress said the IONA acquisition helps round out its product line to provide a "complete SOA backbone" for customers. The company said the deal is expected to close in September, pending regulatory approval in the U.S., IONA shareholder approval, and issuance of an order by the Irish High Court.

IONA's Artix product line offers Web standards based integration technologies for exposing legacy applications to SOA implementations, as well as open source SOA integration components through its FUSE product line. IONA also has endpoint integration with Microsoft's .NET Windows Communications Framework and the open source Spring Java application framework. Progress said these offerings are "fully compatible with the Progress Sonic ESB."

Progress Software has assembled quite a collection of SOA and enterprise computing technologies in recent years, which includes ESB provider Sonic, SOA management/governance vendor Actional, mainframe data integration specialist DataDirect, and mainframe-to-Web vendor NEON Systems (now part of the DataDirect Shadow line).

Some analysts/observers were unmoved by the announcement, however. Dennis Byron, ebizQ's pen source guru, observed: "Effectively this means little to the independent middleware market which had already collapsed in upon itself when BEA was folded into Oracle." He added that "IONA had ceased to be a major factor in the market early this decade, struggling to turn it around from a plateau one-third the size of its 2001 peak of $180 million in revenue." Dennis notes that IONA adds some plum telecommunication and financial services firms to Progress' customer roster, however.

Sanjiva Weerawarana, chairman and CEO of WSO2, also felt that the acquisition was no big deal, as reflected in a blog post entitled: "Yawn. Um. Oh yeah .. Progress bought IONA." Sanjiva called the purchase of IONA, which made about $78 million in 2007, as a "fire sale."

Jason Bloomberg, quoted in PC World, agreed, also adding that IONA likely offers better technology while Progress offers better marketing to the deal. "IONA gets to be part of an organization that has strong sales and marketing, as well as a deep customer base, and Progress gets some of the better technology on the market at what is arguably a fire-sale price."

Some observers fretted that the IONA acquisition would result in competing ESB products. However, the "inestimable and seemingly inexhaustible" Tony Baer (Peter Schoof's apt description) said in a new post that Progress was probably more interested in IONA's Big Iron legacy customer base than its ESB offerings. "This is another step in the winnowing of the ESB market, if there still is such a creature," Tony says. "Last year, which was a good one for the software industry, saw IONA’s revenues go flat and margins sink into the red." Tony feels that the prime attraction for Progress "is the legacy base of Orbix customers whose transaction-heavy loads provide a good complement for its DataDirect business."

The direction of IONA's open source initiatives remains an open question, however. Dennis put it this way: "If IONA was last man standing in the independent middleware market, Progress can be thought of as last man standing in the closed-source culture. One way IONA was trying to get things going again as an independent was through its embrace of the open source culture, development model and terms and conditions."

But it appears, at least from the press release, that IONA will be retaining a degree of independence, so it may have few constraints pursuing its open source strategy. Progress has typically maintained the independent branding of its acquired companies.

Sanjiva says not to worry, Apache will do fine, with or without fully engaged Progress/IONA support. "What will this do the open source projects that Iona used to contribute heavily to in Apache (Apache CXF, Apache ServiceMix, Apache ActiveMQ etc.)? Well, even if Progress decides to defy progress and not go open source (which is my expectation), that's where the beauty of Apache comes in. The maniacal focus on community diversity will mean that even if Progress decides to cut of their own participation in these projects, the projects will live on."

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In physics, they say the simplest solution to a problem is usually the right solution. Applying the laws of physics to SOA, then, it stands to reason that enterprise service buses (ESBs) are the simplest path to SOA within organizations -- and perhaps in many cases, the right path for the organization.

There's been plenty of concern that an economic downturn would skim already bare-bones IT and integration budgets; therefore making it more difficult to launch SOA initiatives that cut across the enterprise. ESBs are a vehicle that can help break the "complex links directly between applications, which are reducing agility, and consuming chunks of the IT budget just in maintenance," says IBM's Lief Davidson.

Lief recently sat down with ebizQ's own Peter Schooff to discuss how SOA managers can employ ESBs to get around any budget crunches incurred from today's tough economy. (Link to transcript and audio file here.)

"The business needs to become simpler and faster to address the various business problems and, hopefully, with a reduction of the complexity that IT is being bound into today, more of the budget can actually be spent in delivering innovative new value rather than keeping existing systems running." This is where ESBs come in, Lief said.

There's been a lot of discussion across the industry as to how far organizations that don't necessarily have the resources or executive political can pursue SOA. Add budget crunches, and SOA becomes an impossible sell -- even though it does provide cost savings and containment in the long run. ESBs may provide a way to kick-start SOA in any climate.

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For some time now, I've heard consultants and analysts propose launching "centers of excellence" or "competency centers" to better manage newer IT initiatives such as SOA is one that has been proposed by consultants for some time now. Not only does such a body help kick-start SOA efforts in the business, but it's also a way to keep such efforts above organizational politics and fiefdoms. The SOA effort can proceed without being encumbered by individual department or management agendas.

Excellent idea. However, such efforts have been slow to evolve, and may be difficult for smaller to medium-size businesses to get in place. ebizQ's recent survey on SOA governance, conducted in partnership with SAP, found that only nine percent of respondents had established some form of competency center/center of excellence to promote and keep SOA efforts on the right track. Almost all of these were larger companies with revenues exceeding $1 billion or more annually. (Our Webinar on the survey results can be viewed here.)

While getting management to commit time and resources to an SOA center in and of itself may be an uphill battle, there may be value in extending the reach of such centers to enterprise data integration as well, according to John Schmidt, VP of Informatica and Chair of the Integration Consortium. This center may be described as an "Integration Competency Center," or ICC. In a chat with Beth Gold-Bernstein, Schmidt provides some guidelines to help businesses of all sizes implement an Integration Competency Center (ICC). He describes the elements that go into an ICC:

Financial management: "The ICC operates as a shared service. This is a set of best practices around charge back for shared infrastructure and individual services."

Architecture: "The ICC does not do enterprise architecture, but is responsible for the information architecture. They work with the enterprise architecture group, and 'connects the dots,' by mapping schemas to physical data sources to enable the translation, transformation, and integration. This ICC is the central federated repository."

Business Process Management. "This is not BPM per se, but this includes service flow modeling, information flows, business event modeling, and common definition of business events."

Integration methodology: "The process of running an ICC, defining it, organizing it, all the things you need to run an integration group, and how it will interact with other IT groups."

Metadata management: "The ICC group is responsible for data assets. Metadata ends up being a federated model."

Modeling management: "This includes techniques around canonical data modeling, what are the best practices, how do you build them."

Integration Systems. "This is about running integration systems as a specific class of applications – all the discipline of how your manage, plan and operate the system."

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In a new post here at ebizQ, Tony Baer has weighed in on the mashup phenomenon that has been gaining ground within the enterprise world.

Tony and I are in agreement that mashups -- the whole idea of lightweight front-end apps that can be assembled by business users -- add a new, more palatable dimension to SOA.

Some observers have been saying that mashups are too consumerish and funtime for more serious SOA efforts. However, there's also an opposing stream of thinking -- some Web 2.0 proponents don't think SOA should be brought into the mashup world -- it will ruin all the fun. David Linthicum says that he even has heard from people "who did not want the term 'mashups' sullied with the term 'SOA.'" As he noted, "the core message is that they view SOA as something that's "enterprisy," and mashups as much more innovative and not really enterprise related."

Here's what Dave had to say about that:

"Not sure I agree with that. While indeed mashups are an innovative way of building very cool applications from many available resources, visual and non-visual, they are still composite applications. While I'm seeing mashups that are completely Web-hosted, I'm seeing more and more that are a mix of Web and enterprise resources, as well as mashups that are true "'enterprise mashups.'"

Indeed, mashups are gaining ground. Dion Hinchcliffe, for one reports fast-breaking progress in mashup adoption across the industry. He noted that there were at least nine different announcements around Web-based mashups coming out of the recent Web 2.0 conference. Dion also cites the latest market overview from Forrester, which estimates that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry.

Mashups do not present an alternative or competition to the composite apps that have been part of the SOA world. As Tony puts it, "the approach is not a black and white SOA vs. mashups choice for enterprise integration, but rather, use of mashups for the last mile of integration that may, in many cases, utilize data services, feeds, or other sources that more often than not are exposed as Web or RESTful Services."

And, may I add, the ease and lightweightness of mashups make it easier to sell the concept of SOA to the business. Because now they can see and feel and touch service orientation. They can (gasp) actually create services on their own. (Here's a case where good governance has to come in -- can't you just see business users, having had a taste of their own service creation, going wild?)

However, as Dion notes, we're not quite there yet with easy-for-business-users-to-use tools. Dion observed that "the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios."

This is in line with research I have been involved with (Evans Data), which, in a recent survey of 380 enterprises, found that the greatest obstacle to user application creation, cited by 22% of respondents from a list, is the lack of availability of easy-to-use assembly tools.

Tony agrees, and sees the progression of tools and methodologies as such:

"I believe that this represents stage 2 of 3 -- the first was emergence of primitive Ajax tooling, the second is more formal delineations that in many ways reflect existing silos within enterprise software architecture. That is, you have database tools, coding tools (also known as IDEs), and then you have your Web design. Ultimately, in stage 3, these approaches themselves will mash up as simply multiple technology-driven paths to the same summit. As long as IT vets it, you shouldn't need different tooling to combine a structured data service with an unstructured content feed, a piece of business logic, with some rich expressive user interface design artifacts."

If mashups can be brought into the same governance space as SOA services -- that is, automated and non-intrusive vetting of services deployed, and accessible directories of what is already out there -- we will be entering an era when business professionals take responsibility for their own domains and applications. That will free up IT to spend more time with the strategic aspects of the business.

IT will better understand the business and the business will better understand IT -- that sounds like the best mashup of all.

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Posted by joemckendrick in Enterprise 2.0 • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Does your SOA initiative remind you more of the gunslinging, saloon-brawling days of the Wild West than of the intrepid pioneers?

Don't feel bad -- most companies are still struggling to tame their Wild West SOA frontiers. The right approaches and solutions can help keep rogue services at bay, while delivering greater value from reusable assets.

I will be joining Christian Hastedt Marckwardt, solution marketing director with SAP, on Tuesday, April 29, at Noon Eastern Time in a special Webinar to discuss the results of a new ebizQ-SAP survey on SOA governance trends and practices.

The survey explored the depth of SOA and SOA governance at organizations. Be sure to join us for a compelling hour, as well as receive a complimentary copy of the complete survey results!

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Business-IT alignment... Has a day gone by over the past ten years that we have not heard that phrase?

While it seems to be a constant but elusive dream -- like peace on Earth -- some companies indicate that SOA may be moving them closer to reality.

Fellow ebizQ colleague James Taylor, out at the IBM Impact confab this week, provides an account of an end-user customer panel on the ever-vexing challenge of business-IT alignment. Is service-oriented architecture helping to bring about some of this alignment?

A panel of corporate practitioners talked about their SOA efforts, and the impact SOA was having on alignment -- a positive impact, by the way. James reports that Randy Wallace from Michelin said one of his company's biggest challenges is "B2B with lots of billers to interface directly in their order management systems so, for instance, allow dealers to integrate orders with Michelin. They are currently evolving their order-to-cash system using Process Server and SOA."

Who much alignment has Michelin seen? According to Wallace, the company has come a long way, "from having a very small percentage of IT spend aligned with key business goals (6%) to one that is much more so (81%)."

That's pretty impressive. Wallace cited some examples: "For instance, in the past business units in different regions picked i2 and Manugistics at the same time and both were implemented resulting in separate systems. A stronger governance process and overall architecture are now established, driven by business ambitions and regularly updated. Far fewer and more focused projects as a result. Senior executive user satisfaction has risen steadily."

Austin Waldron from Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC) said his company's "focus is on using SOA in legacy modernization where many disparate systems are being replaced by a unified set of shared services. The governance issues seem to have been key for HCSC."

Waldron also talked about moving closer to business-IT alignment. "They had some years of IT spend focused more on basic IT infrastructure (security, robustness etc) but now investments much more driven by the business strategy."

Another panalist talked about more alignment at the front lines of the business. Jeff Auker from The Hartford "talked about challenge of consumer front-ends. Consumers working directly with The Hartford now expect a much more interactive online experience for sales and service - this is being driven by GEICO and Progressive’s campaigns. SOA is key because they have some front-ends that are tightly integrated with very old back-ends and SOA let’s them decouple them."

Thanks again to James Taylor for this report .

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Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • Case Study • Management • SOA • SOA Events • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

There's no such thing as a single enterprise SOA. At least not yet.

I just had the opportunity to co-present a Webinar with IBM's Leif Davidson on the topic of "Identifying and Federating Today's SOA Power Centers," in which we explored the results of a recent ebizQ survey of 244 companies.

The survey finds that there's no question that enterprises are firmly committed to service oriented architecture as a strategy going forward - and they're willing to put budget dollars into the endeavor.

But the survey also shows that there's no such thing as a single, all-encompassing SOA effort that covers every service initiative from every corner of the enterprise. Rather, most SOA or enterprise service efforts are "islands" of integration that arise within individual business units, designed to address specific problems.

The challenge is that these separate SOA efforts have different formats and technology foundations under development or implemented within their walls. Many use application servers to support enterprise services, others leverage composite applications on middleware, and others rely on enterprise service buses. In fact, the survey showed that enterprises are taking multiple approaches to building and supporting SOA, including application servers, composite middleware, and enterprise service buses.

The survey also found that most of these service deployments aren't yet interfacing with mission-critical systems. But this is changing rapidly, as the number of services designed for reuse proliferate. The survey finds steady, unrelenting growth in organizations maintaining large volumes of SOA-based services - the number with more than 100 services in production is expected to double.

The bottom line is that there is no single approach to SOA. SOA requires a mix of solutions but the eventual result should be a more reliable, simple and flexible infrastructure and business.

There are two interconnected levels to addressing the problem. First, on a technology level, is federation. One out of four companies have already moved to a federated infrastructure to support multiple instances of ESBs or intermediaries. The survey also shows that those with federated infrastructures are more likely to be able to move from siloed SOA to enterprise-scale SOA.

Then, on a business level, there's governance. Effective governance will make the difference between ending up with a tangle of services -- JBOWS -- or a functioning SOA that truly supports business endeavors at any endpoint across the enterprise. The survey finds that organizations recognize the urgency of governance, but a surprisingly large percentage leave this up to the IT department.

The Webinar in which Leif and I discuss the implications of the survey results can be found here at the ebizQ site. (Registration required.)

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For years, the disciplines of enterprise integration -- followed by SOA -- have always been perceived as "hard and techie." This has made discussions with the business process management (BPM) side of the house difficult.

Now, thanks to the introduction of new lightweight approaches via Web 2.0, SOA, BPM, and integration are now becoming more flexible, user-driven methodologies.

David Linthicum recently spoke with Dr. Dale Skeen, founder of Vitria, a well-established integration vendor, about this shift. (The podcast is here, and a transcript of Dave's discussion with Dale Skeen is available for viewing here.)

This is part of SOA moving into its next generation -- "the next great leap going together is really leveraging three very important technologies in the enterprise -- SOA, BPM and Web 2.0," Dale said. While these three areas are seen as separate technologies or methodologies, Dales sees their inevitable convergence into what he calls an "enterprise platform."

First of all, Dale said, SOA and BPM have always been a natural pairing. "SOA is an enabler that allows you to access business functions, and services, and data universally. BPM is a higher level that orchestrates these business services and human interactions in ways that allow you to meet a business objective. So hence, I've always considered these to be the perfect complementary technologies to work together."

Now, Web 2.0 is bringing SOA-BPM closer to the end user, Dale said. "SOA brings this universal access to services and data through the SOA enablement tools. It does in a secure, manageable, and governed fashion. Now, Web 2.0 brings rich internet interfaces, rich user experiences based on technology such as AJAX and Flex, which are universally available in your Web browser."

"Application integration is hard, and very techie. Web 2.0 allows this notion of mashups where you let users sort of integrate in a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-do fashion."

These are all new trends that are shifting IT empowerment to the business end user, Dale added. "Simple things like mashups, we're talking visual layering of information, we're talking about collaboration technologies such as instant messaging. All of these have a role in enterprise software. And actually, the introduction of that can be very exciting for both the IT and the business side."

IT professionals need not fret over this shift, however, Dale said. "It means that IT will be able to do faster technology upgrades because of that, they have more control over the server aspect of it, and the client side they don't have to worry about. They're going to be able to lower the support costs and it also brings fundamentally new deployment models such as Software-as-a-service, which we think, is going to be a fundamental part of business IT going forward."

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Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • Data Management • Enterprise 2.0 • Management • SOA • SOA Podcasts • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

This Wednesday the 12th, IBM's Leif Davidsen and I will be delivering the results of and commentary around ebizQ's latest survey results on SOA and trends toward ESB federation. (To sign up for the Webinar, click here.)

To help build the conversation that will be taking place within the Webinar, we invite you to join in with any questions or observations you may have.

One inquiry focused on the viability of Web Services Description Language, or WSDL,in a federated environment. Would exposing ESBs as a WSDL be sufficient to link different vendors' ESBs together?

Leif responds that while WSDL can help make the connection, but more is required for a robust SOA infrastructure across business units. "To make the most out of an SOA infrastructure, resources should be used and reused across the business. This will drive the connection of these ESBs to provide end-to-end seamless connectivity," he said.

"From a purely functional point-of-view a service provider and consumer can connect using a WSDL interface. But when looking at the business perspective, important issues such as Governance, Security, Transactionality and Systems Management come into view. In order to invoke the services through a WSDL interface, the service needs to be located. If it exists in a remote system, the security credentials need to be passed along. Updates to transactions add to the complexity and criticality. And of course not every asset is exposed as a Web Service."

"So while WSDL maybe a part of the solution for connecting web services through different ESBs, there are many other aspects to consider other than simple web services connectivity that will be important to businesses when considering the implications of actual deployment."

Join us Wednesday an Noon Eastern Time for the latest data and solutions in managing multiple SOA implementations in our Webinar, Identifying and Federating Today's SOA Power Centers Through Enterprise Service Buses.

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You ever hear about the "rent-a-patient" scheme hatched by a pair of unscrupulous doctors in the LA area? In this incredible-but-true scheme, the doctors performed unnecessary surgery on patients that were recruited by marketers with promises of cash or discounted cosmetic surgery procedures.

Patients were instructed by recruiters to describe false and exaggerated symptoms that were used to create medical charts used to make the surgical procedures appear to be justified. The doctors reportedly racked up claims totaling more than $2 million before being caught. Procedures performed on the otherwise normally healthy patients included colonoscopy, sinus surgeries and thoracic sympathectomy, commonly called "sweaty palm surgery."

Claims fraud gives many insurance carriers sweaty palms, as I documented in this recent article in Insurance Networking News. The good news is that technology -- in the form of analytics -- is providing carriers the tools to rapidly sift through claims data to connect the dots on suspicious activities. Time is of the essence -- claims must be paid within a certain period of time, and once the check is cut and mailed, it's difficult to get the money back.

Here's a role SOA can play as well. Sandy Carter, VP with IBM, just published details in CIO about how SOA is enabling MIB, the industry's largest fraud detection service that is used by nearly every North American life and health insurance carrier, to spot fraudulent activity.

Sandy relates that MIB, which has 500 members, can sift through files from a range of systems to help detect potential fraud among new applicants to insurance policies. MIB's systems can access the applicant's insurance and medical history; the proximity of marriage, establishment of a life insurance policy and a spouse's untimely death, and the frequency of auto accidents resulting in medical claims.

MIB is also employing SOA to "help build an online community among credit reporting agencies, healthcare and insurance providers, and government agencies by extracting the information that’s trapped in various software applications that are located inside and outside a company and bringing it together under one roof in a faster, more secure and economical way. This information helps create an accurate and comprehensive credit history profile while also adhering to industry regulations."

Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • Case Study • Data Management • SOA • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

What lessons have we learned from SOA that can be applied to Web 2.0? Plenty. But perhaps the most important is the role of governance, so organizations can get the most out of the services that are created under their roofs.

ebizQ colleague Gian Trotta recently spoke with Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager with HP Software, who worries that end users may be running away with Web 2.0-based services as end-runs around busy IT departments. (Listen to the complete podcast here, or see the transcript here.)

She notes that IT departments are dealing with "meaty back office problems" but end users are sometimes too impatient to wait for IT departments and their planning processes. So they take their needs into their own hands with new approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration.

IT is caught up in issues such as "'how do I leverage the legacy infrastructure structure,' 'how to do I change my point-to-point integration into more flexible, loose coupling, more dynamic.' 'how do I break up my application silos'? They’re using serious architectural disciplines such as identifying their key reusable components and exposing those as standard space services."

What is happening on the user end is that "creative end users don’t have the time or the patience to wait for this plan to meticulous processes," Emo explains. "So they’re taking their needs into their own hands and using approaches, kind of Wild West approaches like mash-ups and Web collaboration."

But don't worry -- it's all good, Emo says. "These mash-ups in many cases are resulting in big productivity gains," she says. And these productivity gains "are getting the attention of the VPs of the business domains -- the folks with the money," she points out. "And they’re coming back to IT and saying 'make it so' -- support this application."

So the ball eventually ends up in IT's court anyway. The key is that IT will embrace the new "Wild West of Web 2," but pay attention to governance, Emo says. "They can embrace this capability. And they can make it work using the same level of robustness, the same level of service, quality of service. Or they can put up roadblocks and say, 'no, I am not going to let this rogue capability into IT.'

The best bet for managing Web 2.0 approaches, Emo says, is to "combine it with the productivity and architectural best practices of SOA. Effectively, what IT is doing is combining innovation and discipline. And the concept behind this is what HP is calling 'implicit governance.'"

The good part about implicit governance is that Web 2 consumers are "not even aware that they’re participating in an IT governance process, but in essence they are," Emo relates. "They’re assured of getting the service that they just basically have grown up to expect -- the always-on capability."

Emo will be speaking on this issue in a presentation called "Enterprise Mash-Ups for Wall Street: Leveraging SOA Web 2.0" at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street show set for February 11.

Posted by joemckendrick in Enterprise 2.0 • Management • SOA • SOA Events • SOA Podcasts • SOA Vendors  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Friday, October 12th was a pretty exciting day in the SOA vendor world, with Oracle declaring it was willing to pony up close to $7 billion for middleware company BEA Systems. "Not good enough," BEA responded. (Maybe they'll accept my counter-offer -- I'll keep you posted...)

Rumors have been swirling around for months about someone picking up BEA, and Carl Icahn's snatching up a quarter of the stock meant something big was about to go down.

As Tony Baer points out here at ebizQ, BEA has been in a tough spot for some time.

Middleware has always been a tough business. It gets even tougher when your competitors start giving away similar products at low or no cost. BEA's bread-and-butter product, WebLogic, is rapidly rapidly being commoditized by the open-source Java Enterprise Edition application servers (JBoss, Glassfish, et al). It's former flagship product, Tuxedo, is a mainframe play.

Still, to its credit, BEA has remained viable in this tough business, offering integration solutions for companies in the midst of wrestling with SOA. And it has been very successful at staying in the vanguard of service-orientation. BEA has long equated itself as the "Switzerland" of technology.

What would Oracle do with BEA? Would BEA products be folded under Oracle's Fusion middleware? Tony believes the prime products will end up there.

What advantages would this bring to Oracle, which already has a wide array of SOA middleware, not too mention all the other acquisitions it has brought under its umbrella? And most importantly, what will be the impact on users?

Oracle rightly recognizes that SOA is their future. In fact, SOA could put them out of business someday. Companies are learning to use SOA layers as workarounds to proprietary ERP systems and databases. Oracle, like SAP, needs to own the middleware space that threatens to subsume its bread-and-butter products.

Oracle's PeopleSoft and Siebel acquisitions have left a lot of unfinished business; namely customer bases that are resigned to the fact that they will be forced to eventually upgrade into more Oracle-centric environments. Oracle is maintaining these products in a semi-autonomous state, and promises to keep supporting them. However, it's hard to imagine BEA's products and brand not being absorbed into Oracle Fusion. Will BEA customers stay with the new regime, if the acquisition were to go through?

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