If you are a CIO you have probably sat through more sales pitches than you care to remember, and of late some of those are probably for products which promise to deliver you a Service Oriented Architecture for a low, low price (not really that low). Perhaps, like Dave Linthicum, you have begun to notice some of the cracks in their canned sales pitches.

I find it interesting that the advent of SOA is exposing these flaws in vendor-provided solutions and can't help but wonder if it make make more savvy customers of us all. I disagree with Linthicum that any of what he has noticed is anything new, after all; vendors have always come in with canned pitches and have never taken the time to truly consider or adapt their product to the customer's needs. They have something that they have to sell and they tell you what they need to. Solving problems isn't their business, selling product is.

The only difference now is that it's easier to see that this is the case, because, as Joe McKendrick notes, SOA is more a philosophy than a product. People don't want to pay for philosophy, but the products won't work without it... leaving the vendors with half a solution, at best.

So will this sudden exposure of sales teams for what they are result in a broader understanding among CIOs that vendors generally cannot be counted on to provide solutions for their businesses? Or will the buzzword-oriented buying frenzy continue? Linthicum suggests that vendors may have to develop more consultative approaches in their sales pitches, and this may in fact come to pass and help solve the problem from their perspective; but it is actually worse for the prospective customer, because a vendor is not a consultant, and they are there to sell you what they have, not what you might need. You need to find your solution first, either in-house or with a real consultant (who is not beholden to any specific product or vendor), and then go find the vendor that sells it, not the other way around. It's sad but common that consultants are called in to "make this stuff work" when the real answer to the customer's problem was not to have bought that stuff in the first place.