It's the million-dollar question: Will service-oriented architectures (SOAs) lessen dependencies on expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, according to Joshua Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, Calif. He said one implication is clear, though: SOAs will give more power of choice to ERP customers.
Organizations already have "a lot of functionality in their software; they need to unlock it, recombine it and build new functionality in a service architecture," Greenbaum said. "In a well-developed Web services world, you will be able to pick and choose the services you like from any vendor, as long as your architecture lets you do that. From the customer standpoint, this is freedom of choice."
Recognizing this, ERP heavyweights like Oracle Corp., in Redwood Shores, Calif., and SAP AG, in Walldorf, Germany, are racing to be the infrastructure platform of choice, Greenbaum said. SAP's NetWeaver integration and application platform is the technical underpinning to the company's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) strategy. And Oracle's Fusion middleware is the technical foundation for its next generation of applications, dubbed "Project Fusion."
