Gervas
www.aisl-services.com
===================================================================
The recent layoff announcement at Sun Microsystems, while expected for
a while now, sent shudders around Silicon Valley, and on Wall Street,
where share prices tumbled.
The question that hasn't been asked is what impact that will have on
the intersection set between SOA and the open source movement.
Last year, Sun acquired SeeBeyond with the idea of offering a full
life-cycle SOA platform to its customers, dubbed the Sun Java
Composite Application Platform Suite.
The question is whether with 5,000 fewer employees--about 11 percent
of its workforce--the company's efforts to make a splash in the SOA
space will suffer. On one hand, they've got the product--now all they
need to do is push it against the competitive efforts of rival
vendors. That said, with Sun in a cost-cutting mode, will they really
be able to evangelize the marketplace in a way that rivals Oracle,
SAP, et al can't ultimately shout down?
Then there are Sun's rivals on the open-source side. Besides Big Blue,
JBoss, which was recently acquired by Red Hat, has a suite of products
that take aim at Sun's offerings, namely the JBoss Enterprise
Middleware Suite (JEMS) which has been gathering popularity.
One key tension in the SOA space has been whether it should be
vendor-driven or community-driven. There are arguments on both sides:
Vendors can throw their weight behind their own chosen standards. At
the same time, multiple vendors with multiple standards can confuse
the marketplace. Given the nature of SOA, and the notion of loosely
coupled systems that interoperate freely, multiple competing standards
is not, intrinsically, a good thing.
On the flip side, community-driven efforts are evolutionary, with
standards being adopted democratically. That, again, makes life tough
on CIOs who have, as a business imperative, strategies to put in
place, and benchmarks to hit. No time to wait for evolution in the
fast-paced world of high-tech business.
That puts Sun, which is both an open-source evangelist, as well as an
SOA vendor, at a kind of crossroads. On one hand, they have a suite to
sell, as well as a community to support. Sun's personnel woes, if they
do come to impact its SOA push, will diminish an important voice in
the SOA market.
What do you think about all this? Participate in this week's poll to
sound off on what impact you think Sun's layoffs will have on the SOA
space.
Sean Wolfe
Editor, SOA Pipeline
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.SOA-Pipeline.com
SPONSORED LINKS
| Computer software | Computer aided design software | Computer job |
| Soa | Service-oriented architecture |
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
- Visit your group "service-orientated-architecture" on the web.
- To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
