Seeing beyond point-to-point integration

If a vendor calls something SOA, is it SOA? Michael Meehan over at SearchWebServices raises this question in his latest update on Sun's SeeBeyond acquisition, which was finalized last week.
    
Sun Microsystems has rechristened SeeBeyond's integration suite as the Sun Java Integration Suite, and now, "must migrate the SeeBeyond product away from its proprietary, point-to-point roots and into a loosely coupled, service-oriented world," Meehan writes. "SeeBeyond's core product is still a pre-SOA enterprise application integration tool, and many analysts take a dim view of EAI these days."

One of those analysts is ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer, who opined that "we never recommend companies buy more integration middleware. That's the tightly coupled world people need to get away from." Supporting Web services does not automatically lead to SOA, but Schmeltzer observes that "when they say service-oriented, they mean they've got Web services interfaces," he said. "We're not talking about architectures of agility here. They apply so much glue to infrastructure they end up gluing customers in place."