"I'm not saying it's impossible, but it'll be really, really hard to be successful." That's how a Forrester Research analyst described the task Oracle faces in integrating all its recent enterprise software acquisitions.It got me thinking about how the traditional vendor strategy for enterprise applications- big, integrated suites as a bulwark to assert dominance over customers' software buying patterns-is increasingly at odds with the emerging thinking on enterprise architectural strategy: SOA.

In the last century, vendor strategy pretty much lined up with thinking on architecture: Standardize as much as possible to reduce integration headaches. That was great for vendors. If you owned the major chunk of a customer's enterprise software architecture, you got two big advantages: First, the suite was so big and complex that the customer had little incentive to get rid of it over the long term, which guaranteed streams of revenue in the form of maintenance fees, which could be raised incrementally over time; second, you got a critical advantage in selling them new software: Fear of integration problems and management complexity if they bought stuff from someone else.

But today, the dominant architectural trend, SOA, is diverging from the vendor strategy. SOA says the enterprise application infrastructure   is   almost   irrelevant. Technology is constructed according to services specified by the business. In this scenario, enterprise applications become just a piece of the service, yet another component of a larger business process. The  vendor  of  the  applications  doesn't matter  anymore;  the  linkages  between them become the important thing.

In this sense, the vendors' integration strategies become more important than the features of their software suites. Of course, both  the  dominant  enterprise  software vendors, Oracle and SAP have begun offering integration middleware to go along with their big software suites. Yet both are sticking with the big, integrated software suite vision. Indeed, Oracle has pledged to meld all the best of all its different acquisitions together into something greater: Fusion.

But that begs the question: Why? Why try to integrate or build something that serves all the diverse interests of all the customers that bought Peoplesoft, Oracle and J.D. Edwards when the emerging SOA strategy is telling your customers that it's okay to have diversity in your software portfolio?And SOA isn't just popular with CIOs. In many companies, business people are pushing  the  SOA  strategy  pitch.  They want linked business services and flexible new workflows and processes-software architectures and infrastructures are less important to them than ever.

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