New tools cost less and handle tasks with ease, but commercial players are easier to use.
Don't have six or seven figures to sink into commercial service-oriented architecture? Price is one of the most appealing selling points for open source SOA products. However, the price for these low- or no-cost, feature-rich platforms is often an enterprise service bus that's not designed for business users, requiring technical expertise that can drag the SOA platform down.
There are some notable exceptions, and open source leaders are increasingly aware of the problem, prompting a rush to develop "orchestration" elements in open source ESBs. Still, most aren't there yet.
Click here to read the InformationWeek Open Source SOA Report written by Cristian Sturek, XWebServices, Inc.'s Principal SOA Architect.
