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My fellow eBizQ blogger Beth Gold-Bernstein has been using Alfred Chuang's comment that "BEA is the only unified SOA platform" to spark a conversation about the definition of a complete and unified SOA platform and whether SOA is really a product. I think she makes a lot of good points about the current state of the market, about what SOA really is, and about how the various SOA tools and components should converge.

However, it's also started a bit of a side conversation about the veracity of Alfred's comments. And to the people in that conversation I say "lighten up". CEOs and product marketers have been saying "the only solution to offer a complete..." since the beginning of time. A quick Google search for "'the only' BPM solution" reveals 94,000 different claims of uniqueness in a very crowded marketplace. Some of the top claims were "the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM", "The only unified ECM & BPM enterprise platform", "the only BPM solution that combines the industry leading analytics capabilities with a powerful business process management platform", "the only BPM solution that seamlessly integrates content", "the only BPM solution that offers enterprise-class search", and "the only vendor in the industry to combine the power of process, knowledge, and analytics in a unified BPM suite".

Every one of these claims is based on a very narrow definition. If you challenged any of these claims the vendor would come back with the argument "other vendors aren't really 'enterprise'", or "other vendors aren't really 'unified'", or "other vendors aren't really 'seamless'" or some other nonsense.

The bottom line is that anybody can be the market leader if you get to make your own narrow market definition. Alfred was trying to call attention to the fact that one of the SOA thought leaders and enterprise middleware platform leaders now owns one of BPM leaders. And highlighting that the unification of those technologies and strategies can benefit customers. A legitimate point, in my opinion. Let's not get too caught up in reading more than that into a press release.

Posted by davidogren at 02:53 PM in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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