“We never recommend companies buy more integration middleware,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC. “That’s the tightly coupled world people need to get away from.”

Schmelzer believes the challenge facing Sun is “to make SeeBeyond customers into SOA users.”

The ability to support dynamic business processes and work with composite Web services is critical in SOA, but Schmelzer stressed that doing it in a one-to-one fashion misses the point.

“When they say service-oriented, they mean they’ve got Web services interfaces,” he said. “We’re not talking about architectures of agility here. They apply so much glue to infrastructure they end up gluing customers in place.”

That is why he believes the migration path Sun lays out will be more important than the acquisition itself.

“They need to show people how they’re going to get to a composite SOA suite,” he said. “It has to prove that it gets it.”

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