Service-Oriented Architecture

Due to this, IT organizations are facing many challenges in adopting these.Some of them are

1) If there are overlapping subject areas among two standards, how to select between those (e.g. Eventing vs. Notification)?
2)How to proceed with a standard when currently, the product/tool vendor’s adoption is low, but there is a defined adoption roadmap from vendor? When there is no defined roadmap, it becomes another level of issue.
3) When a specific standard (e.g. BPEL4WS) is extended by a vendor (e.g. IBM), what should be the internal IT strategy? 1) adopt the vendor extensions or 2) limit to the standard?

There questions are just the tip of the iceberg.  Midst of this confusion, there are many interesting happenings, which are promising, many times unconventional. As an example Microsoft promises 'not to assert' claims to 35 Web services patents, including SOAP, WSDL, and many WS-* specs.

To the question of ‘Why did Microsoft take this approach?’, Microsoft answers ‘It was a simple, clear way, after looking at many different licensing approaches, to reassure a broad audience of developers and customers that the specification(s) could be used for free, easily, now and forever.’ Fair enough; no body can disagree!!!

Midst of industry predictions on SOA related patent wars, the above might be a good news.

In the future discussions, I would be analyzing the subject area of individual standards or   positioning, level of maturity and adoption.