SOA for SAP

SAP has an interesting message on SOA, if I'm reading Joe McKendrick right on this - you can use SAP's SOA methods while starting out small as a subscriber to their SaaS offering, and then scale up to their enterprise offering later, in what would certainly be advertised as a "seamless transition."

This is precisely the sort of thing that a consistent architecture should allow. Of course, it cuts both ways - you could also (theoretically) move from SAP's enterprise offering to their SaaS offering. Or more interestingly, move to a competitor who offers the same set of SAP-compatible methods.

What, exactly, would prevent Oracle from offering a set of SAP-compatible methods? And who will be the first to try to claim intellectual property rights on a URL? Is http://mycompany.com/services/sap/adduser© right around the corner?

Once there is a significant set of companies who have committed to a particular vendor's SOA methods, they're also primed for another vendor to come sniffing around with a translation layer and lower pricing.