SAP's SOA strategy 'is so 1995'

Dave Linthicum had three words for SAP's plans to move 10,000 customers to its SOA platform within the next 12 months: "That's so 1995."

The era of customers being herded like cattle to forced or enticed migrations is over, Dave says, and SOA is one of the very reasons that era is coming to an end:

"If the ERP guys understood anything about SOA they would know that there is no way they can lead that market because it's all about systemic change to the enterprise, not layering in more processes, services-enabled ERP systems, or middleware. This kind of stuff drives me nuts."

Dave, who has run several SOA companies himself, had some advice for ERP vendors looking to better exploit the SOA phenomenon: the days of trying to dominate the entire stack are over. ERP vendors are now "competing with other enterprise services and composite applications providers, and in many instances will see their services being pushed out of the way for processes or services that are a better fit for customers."

Was 1995 that bad of a year?  SAP's R/3 was not for wimps, and that's when an AS/400 was an AS/400, not a "System i." We were so much younger, we were designing our first Web pages, and all we had to worry about was the Year 00.