“There’s a great big picture battle going on here about where the intelligence in a service-oriented architecture should lie,” said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst for ZapThink LLC. “On one hand you have the message-centric middleware model, on the other is the intelligent network approach.”

Bloomberg explained that, as XML devices, chip sets and network agents mature, they could take over the space traditionally occupied by integration software, eliminating the middleman, if you will.

“If we do service-oriented architecture right, the integration becomes the byproduct of the architecture,” he said. “Then you’ll be able to make security decisions, apply policies and have all your services intermediaries in the network itself.”

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