Yet Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, warned against reading too much into the new product designation.

“SOA is not just a market thing,” he cautioned. “And it’s not interfaces that you need to change. If it was that easy then we’d have all done it 10 years ago. It’s a complete change in the way you deliver services. We no longer think about building monolithic applications and integrating them. We think about building services and composing them.”

He said that while Sun has made some minor upgrades to the SeeBeyond offering and combined it with various Sun offerings, “it’s basically the same old stuff.” He looked to Sun’s open source communities as a potential way to shake it loose from its current integration and Java moorings.

“They need to embrace service-oriented architecture as something that’s fundamentally different from Java,” Schmelzer said. “That may be the hardest thing for them to do.”

He noted that SOA is not object-oriented like Java and does not rely on portable code.

“Sun gets into a bind when they combine the two,” he said.

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