It is indeed an interesting time in enterprise software. Suddenly, the major enterprise vendors are all deciding that they will own SOA and make it the foundation of their own development and partner ecosystem. In addition, each vendor hopes to win the hearts and minds of the customers and the partners at the same time. Which vendors are positioning themselves for this leadership? IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Fujitsu (with its partner Software AG), BEA, Tibco, and a host of others.
Ironically, many industry observers were skeptical when IBM declared in the late 1990s that it would abandon the packaged applications market and focus instead on middleware to enable the business applications. Now, of course, the application vendors are beginning to recognize that middleware infrastructure is critical to the success of a SOA environment. So the battle for supremacy has begun.
