The superiority of traditional best of breed or point solutions versus integrated ERP suites has been an everlasting debate in the industry. CIOs have heard conflicting messages from our industry for years—sometimes from the same software CEO!

At the AMR conference recently we heard SAP saying that “best of breed is dead” and Microsoft arguing that “the future will be best of breed”. But what is emerging on the horizon is a new platform concept for enterprise applications. That is service oriented architecture (SOA).

The selection of a SOA is likely going to be a big technology decision.

So what is SOA? SOA is not a product, although several vendors offer products which can form the basis of a SOA. Examples of such products include SAP NetWeaver, IBM WebSphere, or BEA AquaLogic.

A service oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other using web services technologies such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL. We are seeing many application vendors realize the integration pain among their customers as an opportunity to have a SOA infrastructure in place to align those issues.

In fact by default you have vendors launching a SOA initiative to acknowledge the fact that point solutions must coexist. Nobody has a lead in delivering SOA and as AMR puts it: “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”.

But again, as this IT shift around middleware and standards is taking place, it does answer our original question of what will prevail: best of breed.