With CIOs reluctant to upgrade to new versions of enterprise software, the big vendors are saying: "Look, we can't sell with our old value proposition any more", says Gartner's Sholler. "So they're trying to make [their software] the foundation for other solutions in markets they haven't been able to reach."
But this strategy has put the enterprise application companies on a collision course with traditional middleware providers such as BEA, IBM and WebMethods, which are coming to the SOA party from the bottom up, through the integration infrastructure layer. "Everybody is winding up tangled up in the same space," says Sholler.
Although the integration infrastructure companies have much more experience with the foundational elements of SOA, all vendors are looking to build long-term relationships with customers. Consequently, despite the abundance of Web services standards embedded in their products to ease integration headaches, everybody has a proprietary hook somewhere. Oracle's Fusion applications will work only with Oracle's database. SAP's new applications require NetWeaver middleware, according to Gartner and Forrester Research. Even the integration infrastructure companies have enough proprietary elements to make it difficult to swap out their integration software.
The bottom line for CIOs? Beware vendors pledging to build your SOA for you. Unless you're not worried about dependence on your vendor.
But CIOs on the whole fear dependency, especially in the current wave of consolidation, according to a 2005 Accenture survey of CIOs. While 65 percent of CIOs said vendor consolidation makes for a more integrated software infrastructure, and 61 percent believe it will reduce their vendor management burden, 87 percent said vendor consolidation will lead to lock-in, 61 percent believe it will decrease price competition, and 57 percent believe it will reduce pressures for vendors to innovate. Only 35 percent saw vendor consolidation as a good thing.
For SOA believers like Transamerica's Gleason, an independent SOA controlled by the CIO is one of the best protections against lock-in. "No one vendor can be all things to everyone," he says. "There's always going to be somebody out there who will be able to do a piece of your process better than anybody else can. And the first company to adopt that is going to have competitive advantage."
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