What You Want Your CIO to Know (Continued)

Assessing Vendor Positions
Although part of the promise of SOA is a cross-platform exchange that allows competing technologies such as Java and .NET to talk, that doesn't mean products and platforms won't matter. As always, vendors are jockeying for position, touting their products as the best answer for your organization.

Sorting between differing vendors can be tough, and this is where you can help top management, who should be at least partly relying on trusted in-house architects and developers for advice as they head down the path to SOA. Of course, whatever technologies you're running now will probably affect your future direction. But a great advantage of Web services and SOA is that you can leverage your heterogeneous environments—if you've been a Java shop but see advantages in a Microsoft solution, you can more easily integrate .NET into your existing environment.

One thing you want to be careful about is making sure you choose vendors and products participating in the development of Web services standards. Companies such as BEA, IBM, and Microsoft have been heavily involved in standards boards from the beginning, so that's a good indication of future interoperability.

In terms of tools, you can reassure management that top vendors are now including the basic tools needed to create SOA environments in their products. J2EE products from BEA, IBM, and Oracle, as well as Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, for example, contain the necessary development environment and Web services calls, along with XML creation capability.

According to ZapThink, vendors' offerings fall into two rough categories of choices, and you might want to weigh your approach based on that. First is the application-centric approach, which ZapThink says works best in less heterogeneous environments with a smaller set of technologies. IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle all offer products that fall in this category.

The other approach is based around message queuing and asynchronous messaging, or what's referred to as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). It uses a more message-oriented approach to connecting systems, Schmelzer said, and thus can be cost-effective. Smaller players such as Sonic Software are competing here, although Microsoft's, BEA's, and IBM's products also fall into this space.

Whatever vendor you choose, keep a close eye on standards. That's the advice of David Linthicum, CTO of Grand Central Communications, a company making a big play in Web services and SOAs. "People need to be careful about lock-in," Linthicum said. "Watch out for proprietary interfaces and extensions that go beyond the standard. Make sure they can work and play with other technologies."