When representatives of the software industry talk about collaboration these days, it is less about what their software enables users to do to drive higher productivity and more about what players in the industry are doing among themselves.
Joint ventures seem to be increasingly common and this week has seen yet another announcement of a collaborative effort around standardisation.
BEA Systems, IBM, IONA Technologies, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, Sybase and Xcalia have agreed to work together on specifications designed to simplify the creation and implementation of applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The initiative to create new industry standards for SOA is good news because a lack of standardisation around the design methodology has been widely identified as a significant inhibitor to its keen adoption.
Going mainstream
When it does take off, it will be every vendor for itself in trying to grab a piece of the action.
Warwick Ashford, portals managing editor
The SOA vendor group has undertaken to work together to come up with a common service component architecture (SCA) for developing business services and common service data objects (SDO) for accessing different kinds of data.
If the initiative is successful, it will provide a royalty-free programming language neutral assembly model as well as specifications for implementing SCA service components and SDO specifications for data exchange for Java and C++, which could be just the boost SOA needs to go mainstream in a big way.
While being described as an important step towards enabling customers to tap into the power of Web services, can we really believe that ruthless competition is making way for cooperation?
A more likely explanation is that the industry is getting real about the fact that SOA has to take off properly if it is to deliver any revenue at all. So what may be touted as collaboration for the good of the end-user is really shrewd collaboration to ensure the health of the industry so there is still a point to ruthless competition.
According to the analysts, the pickings should be good because the SOA design methodology promises to enable organisations to transform existing IT assets into reusable services for building complex applications that can be adapted rapidly to meet changing business needs.
What organisation would not buy that concept?
Probably none, providing the conditions are right and the business case is clear. That is arguably what this newly announced initiative is really all about. This is the industry proving that it has learned to work smarter by collaborating just enough with peers in the industry to make sure the next big wave actually happens.
Fierce rivalry
When it does take off, it will be every vendor for itself in trying to grab a piece of the action. Competition will be as fierce as ever. It will just move to a different level in a slightly different arena.
Cooperation around technology is taking place only because competitive advantage has shifted away from technology alone to applying technology effectively to make business work.
Industry experts are predicting future competitive advantage and market leadership will be attained only through a focus on business processes optimisation. That`s what SOA is all about.
Collaboration in the software industry may be more than a little self-serving, but if the full potential of SOA is achieved through that collaboration, all players should benefit. Vendors and customers.
To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, vendors have apparently matured and realised that without some degree of collaboration, life in the future software market would be short, brutish and nasty, so by working together at least they can ensure it won`t necessarily be short.
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