“There are two challenges that any company, and especially IBM, will face in trying to accelerate the pace of SOA adoption among end-users,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, Cambridge, Mass.

“The first is that while technologies and even standards-based technologies like Web services are fairly straightforward to sell, architectures are much more complicated. In particular, it’s very hard to put architecture into a single product and sell that. What I mean is that companies can’t just buy a product and expect the product to give them architecture. Architecture emerges from best practices, experience and a set of disciplines that enable the company to realize the benefits of the architecture. In the case of SOA, those benefits are loose coupling, coarse granularity and asynchrony. While one or two of those might be facilitated by a product, you can’t really instantly get an SOA by implementing a product,” said Schmelzer.

Read more at: eWeek