I’m in Half Moon Bay, CA at the AMR Strategy 21 event. It’s the end of the first day of sessions and there’s one resounding theme - SOA, SOA, SOA (if you haven’t seen this before, this is Services Oriented Architecture). Presentations from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, salesforce.com and Rearden Commerce all touted the benefits of SOA to businesses (reusable code, more adaptable business processes, etc.).

The verbal jabs that Shai Agassi of SAP continually threw at Oracle, followed by the expected rebuttals from Oracle were actually more entertaining.

There’s a lot of talk about the emergence of Business Process Platforms and how SOA enables this to take place (SAP’s NetWeaver and Oracle’s Fusion are competing implementations of this vision). This is all based on web services (our RapidResponse web client is built on a set of web services). Whereas applications have historically been vertical silos (CRM, ERP, SCM, PLM, etc.), the reality is that users and business processes work more horizontally, with data and workflows moving across these applications. SOA helps to address these problems, allowing various web services to be composed into composite applications that align more with users and business process workflows that silos of functionality.

As someone that’s been in the software industry for a number of years, this evolution will be interesting to watch unfold. A lot of the presenters spoke of a multi-year adoption cycle and Shai suggested that we’d be in the middle of the adoption curve by about 2010. The other area of debate (separating marketing from reality) here is exactly how much are customers adopting this today and are they really asking for it. I would be interested in your thoughts on that.

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