Vendor accord

For Microsoft, the change to service-oriented communication marks a shift in how applications interact. Explicitly designed to support service-oriented applications for Microsoft, their WCF (Windows Communication Foundation-a programming model for using managed code to build unified web services and other distributed systems that can communicate) reflects this shift.

"How this communication is accomplished has taken a big step forward in the last few years," said Joelle Woo, director, Developer & Platform Group, Microsoft Hong Kong. "After decades of disagreement, all of the major vendors have agreed to support the same protocols for application communication."

"Based on SOAP, this global agreement on web services makes interoperability between applications built on different technology platforms, such as J2EE and the .NET Framework, significantly simpler than it has been in the past," she said. "It also makes the idea of SOA more plausible for most organizations."

Big Blue has also developed an SOA Foundation: an integrated set of open standards-based software, best practices, governance models and patterns to help clients model, assemble, deploy and manage SOA.