Every emerging technology moves through predictable phases of adoption. Throughout these phases there are equally predictable signposts indicating whether the new technology will take root in the mainstream, or be relegated to the sidelines. No clearer sign of an innovation's merit can be found than when leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors begin tapping into that technology's promised capabilities. The evolution of Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have risen from once being considered bleeding-edge technologies to forming the strategy cornerstones of today's leading ERP vendors.

But the reality is that the ERP vendors, too, are at an early stage of adoption. The initial strategy is to use Web services to move away from their traditional monolithic architecture by exposing component business processes as Web services. This conceptually allows these ERP processes to be used with other Web services within the enterprise, but such an approach relies heavily on an SOA infrastructure to provide the necessary interoperability between Web services from many differing sources. Companies must perform the due diligence to ensure that their ERP vendor is sufficiently motivated to provide an SOA infrastructure that can effectively leverage Web services from all sources - not just those from the ERP vendor - as the consequences of selecting a potentially limiting, vendor-specific approach to integration and SOA can be severe.

Enterprise integration vendors, on the other hand, have their history in application interoperability as their highest priority. The more progressive of these companies have taken the lead in developing and embracing SOA and Web services infrastructure technologies. Indeed, certain integration platforms have been built such that everything they touch - every application and every data source - can be implemented as a service, so that supporting Web service standards is simply a matter of a snap-in protocol. This capability effectively exposes all IT assets as Web services, even those legacy assets not designed with Web services in mind. The result is the best of both worlds - an SOA infrastructure that functions effectively as both a producer and a consumer of Web services.

Another important consideration is the evolution of standards. Web services standards are still fairly nascent, and while most vendors support widely accepted standards like XML and SOAP, there are still a number of gaps in the standards yet to be finalized. Progressive enterprise integration vendors have stepped in to fill these gaps within their SOA platforms to provide the enterprise-class service necessary to run mission-critical processes. These solutions are architected so that new standards can easily be plugged into the platform as these standards are released. A standards-based, vendor-neutral platform that readily addresses the evolving SOA capabilities prevents organizations from being locked into any specific ERP vendor's technology and ensures that emerging standards will be properly implemented.

Without a proven SOA platform, companies may find themselves once again building point-to-point integrations between Web services creating a whole new generation of fragile legacy applications. Point-to-point connections - even if they are Web services-based - are slow and costly to develop, difficult to maintain and inflexible. Each time a new connection is added, the complexity of the application grows exponentially. A platform with mature SOA capabilities provides the tools to discover, orchestrate, and deploy Web services as coordinated business processes in a graphical, intuitive development environment. Such platforms address vital issues such as security, availability, and reliability, thereby eliminating the problems inherent with the point-to-point approach.

The decision by ERP vendors to embrace Web services and SOAs may deliver significant benefit. However, it is vital that companies consider how to best achieve the maximum return on their investment in Web services, secure the future of their IT assets, and maintain corporate agility. The answer to that challenge lies in developing an enterprise-wide, vendor-neutral strategy for Web services and SOAs. Through such a strategy, business processes can be streamlined, redundant processes eliminated, and valuable blocks of programming can be reused for many different purposes.