Breaking up is not so hard to do - tech focus 2: soa

THE SERVICE-ORIENTED architecture (SOA) approach to design raises a number of problems for software vendors. But that may be good news for customers who have often been at the mercy of lock-in strategies formulated by vendors who will organise their application designs to make it difficult to integrate new functions unless they come from that same vendor. However, there are also potential problems for the user organisations as they try to organise discrete applications and systems into cross-company services that can be used by anyone with the right authentication. Alex Cullen, analyst at Forrester Group, has raised the concern that, in an environment where all the software services are shared, no-one has ownership of that code.