Sun on SOA

Must be selling season. Just took a meeting with local Sun folks talking about, among other things the SOA links with identity management. They've got a lot of attractive stuff on offer around managing heterogeneous environments. When you're a geek like me, you like the chatter about SOA, but I suppose their selling technique comes off as a bit technical, which isn't always the best approach.

Kudos for no power points on this one. That's really refreshing especially after sitting through some of the very highly polished presentations from IBM and BEA. If you can get your points across using a white board like that you obviously know your stuff.

I feel like the SOA implementation stuff shouldn't be a marquee selling point, but I'm sure if anyone can get away with that, it's Sun.

IBM on SOA

Yesterday I attended an IBM presentation by VP Doug Cox on Service-Oriented Architecture. The pitch was very much around what are the value-adds WebSphere can offer to leverage an SOA. I've been to some other vendors pitches recently including BEA's, but Doug's approach struck me as a very clever sales technique. There's a lot of effort that goes into explaining what is SOA, but that's not really where vendors should focus their efforts. Consider that the vendor-neutral aspects of SOA mean that vendors will gain their competitive advantage not from their SOA support, which is (will be) ubiquitous, but instead on their value-added use of SOA.

IT executives still need to understand SOA, so perhaps it's not so bad that they should seek their definition from elsewhere. I'm about halfway through professor Thomas Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design (ISBN 0-13-185858-0), which is a thick one that provides a good framework for explaining the architectural concepts and implementation strategy is sufficient detail.