Anarchy in SOA-land is causing specialist software companies to align themselves with "best practice" general infrastructure vendors, such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. But according to Peter Still, global vice-president of strategy at SAP partner RuleBurst, this teaming up with big players will save software-as-a-service from SOA anarchy.
"The irony of SOA is, if you have a large proliferation of services you can recreate the spaghetti integration problem," Still says.
"It's important for smaller vendors like RuleBurst to contribute to a well-governed SOA, rather than the anarchy some of the hype is about. With our decision support services, it's important for us to provide a central repository rather than an atomic spread of services around an organisation."