Randy Weston has a summary of AMR Research's Strategy 21 conference last week, The theme is "Dateline 2010: Divining the Future of Enterprise Software." Executives from SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft as well as up-and-comers salesforce.com, Rearden Commerce, and Workday espoused their thoughts to their partners and peers on how the next four years will play out with SOAs and on demand, and how technology will change the way we work and play.

Excerpts from the same:

Platform wars are afoot: One thing became very clear: the next four years will be marked by fierce platform wars as enterprise application and infrastructure vendors jockey to control and own the SOA platform. Expect the biggest marketing battle between SAP and Oracle. "We can't do everything. It's impossible," Mr. Agassi explained. "So, we said, let's do what we do, the core stuff, and lift that burden off the ISVs (Independent Software Vendors)."

Fusing with Fusion:For its part, Oracle is banking you'll like Fusion and that it will tie its many acquisitions together, a message that was being clarified up the road in San Francisco at the time of this writing."You need to know that if you don't like what Oracle does, you can go talk to IBM to support these things." He continued referring to the more standards-based approach that Oracle and others are taking versus SAP's more customized ESA approach to SOA.

What about IBM and Microsoft?Rod Smith, IBM's software group's vice president of emerging technologies, says the war of words between the various platform players doesn't really matter in the long run, because it's customers who make the ultimate decision about what platform they'll standardize upon."Businesses are not going to swallow the SOA Kool-Aid without knowing what the business results will be," he told the ISV-heavy audience, who are the ones who have the most at stake in this war. "If we are going to have interoperable solutions, then we need to hold ourselves, SAP, Oracle, and everyone accountable. Companies want to make their own decision about where they want go, and they are not letting it be steered by any one vendor."

Microsoft's Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of .NET business development, held a similar opinion. "I don't agree with what was said earlier; I think in the future it will be best of breed, but it will be built upon core platforms with relevant tools," he argued. "The smarter, higher end customers are thinking clearly about this. They are in charge; they are the ones looking for ROI."

salesforce.com itching for a fight salesforce.com, for one, isn't ready to acquiesce and turn the market over to SAP or Oracle.The company is in the process of transforming itself from an on-demand CRM vendor into an on-demand platform. That platform is its new AppExchange program, which saleforce.com Executive Vice President Parker Harris likened to "iTunes for enterprise apps"

To buy or not to buy...So what about the Software as a Service (SaaS) versus licensing model debate? Most espoused a hybrid model, in which customers buy some apps, install on premise, and use SaaS for others. In fact, IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft all touted this model. It's a 180-degre turn for SAP, which a year ago was ridiculing the idea of on demand.

Where can SOAs take us? SOAs have so much potential to take us beyond that into uses we haven't thought of before. Rearden and Workday were on hand to demonstrate just such potential. Rearden is bringing the SOA phenomenon to the consumer with an innovative, Web-based concierge service of sorts. It's using the technology of SOA to build systems that help aggregate personal services, such as plane tickets, hotels, car services, and even theater tickets and calendar reminders, for an upcoming trip.

Customers to vendors: prove it Everyone has this SOA catch-phrase attached to their product, and they don't even know what it is," said Norm Fjedheim, CIO of Qualcomm.Mike Jackson, CIO at Rockwell Automation, didn't have a much higher opinion. "It's overhyped," he said, adding that he isn't convinced SOAs won't complicate Rockwell's environment more at a time when the company is trying to cut down chaos and lack of control.

Prashanth RaiTag(s):SOA, SaaS