"It's clear that Oracle has the right idea but the challenge is making sure that it [the suite] lives up to its promise. Oracle bought a number of different companies and they're rolling all these products together," said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink.

Oracle and other companies with SOA suites, such as BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems, may be overdoing it, said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "There may be too much in them to make them practical," he said.

SOA is a user architecture unrelated to a specific project, Willett said. Architectures are developed over time, he said. "People usually don't re-architect their entire IT system just all at once."

Although Oracle is including its ESB in the suite, the company cautions that an ESB is not tantamount to an SOA, and that other tools are needed, also. "There's a lot of people who say SOA equals ESB. I would say if you make this equation, you're probably in trouble," said Markus Zirn, a senior director for product management at Oracle.

The company, meanwhile, is sticking to its guns about the concept of SOA 2.0 (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/19/79432_HNoracleda_1.html), a term recently floated by Oracle and Gartner to describe event-oriented, closed-loop SOA. The appearance of the term, however, incited opponents to start an online petition (http://www.mwdadvisors.com/resources/stop-the-madness.php) against the new terminology, believing creation of a new buzzword to be counterproductive.