Endless summer of SOA acquisitions

Is this a great time to be an SOA vendor, or what? 

Some industry observers may have declared SOA DOA in recent months, but someone forgot to invite Flashline, Webify, MRO Software, and Mercury Interactive to the funeral. What do these smaller, specialized vendors have that makes the big vendors want to throw bags stuffed with money at them?

Dana Gardner provides his usual spot-on insights into the motivations behind BEA's acquisition of Flashline on Wednesday. Dana speculates that the acquisition was a response to the fairly recent HP acquisition of Mercury Interactive: "BEA uses the Systinet UDDI registry within its AquaLogic-branded registry. But BEA must have seen the writing on the wall when Systinet, as part of Mercury Interactive, recently when to HP. How long will HP be interested in supplying BEA with its registry?" Dana also points to the fact that registry -- the key to governance -- is now a must-have for any vendor that is serious about pitching SOA.

Service-oriented architecture has also been driving IBM of late with its own acquisitions, as detailed by CNET's Martin LaMonica here. IBM's summer spree has led my colleague Dan Farber to conclude: "Will IBM move up the stack into applications–not to packaged applications, but to loosely coupled, pre-built components for CRM or other tasks or business processes that can be easily assembled and integrated to solve specific problems? It seems inevitable…"