Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst of SOA and Web services research outfit ZapThink, said Oracle’s maneuver is a positive step for a company that had a gaping SOA value proposition, having offered only an SOA developer kit earlier this year. IBM, HP (Quote, Chart), Computer Associates (Quote, Chart) and smaller vendors already sell SOA software products and/or services.

“This is a major deal for Oracle, because it bumps Oracle from an SOA-by-lip-service company to an SOA-in-reality company,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “Collaxa has been delivering on real implementations of process-driven SOA for a few years, so there’s no doubt that the addition of this product will add real SOA capabilities to the Oracle line.”

However, Schmelzer said it’s not yet clear how Collaxa technology will fit in with the rest of Oracle’s product lines, noting that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) (define) and customer relationship management (CRM) (define) application lines “could seriously benefit from an SOA re-architecture.

“But there’s no evidence that shows that they will be applying Collaxa in that way,” he continued. “Right now, I think they’re still looking to plug holes in their SOA offering. We’ll have to see if it really achieves that goal.”

Read more at: InternetNews