While bigger SOA players continue swallowing smaller ones, the number of choices customers have for infrastructure naturally decreases, but there are other factors that keep a variety of SOA platforms available.
A few vendors, including IBM and Oracle, now offer the convenience of a soup-to-nuts SOA platform -- but at the risk of locking in their customers to a proprietary stack or selling them more than they need as part of a suite or package, Paul Krill reports in How to handle SOA vendor consolidation.
"Because most SOA efforts seek to reuse existing applications wherever possible, IT will have to do custom coordination no matter how integrated the SOA platform," Krill explains. "That helps blunt the 'one provider' argument."