We have the results of two recent polls from SOA Pipeline for you this week. The first was prompted by Sun's snapping up of SeeBeyond to strengthen its SOA hand; we asked if mergers and acquisitions are good or bad for the industry, and you overwhelming said that they were good. A full 70 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that "Mergers and acquisitions are good for the SOA market, they strengthen the resources behind critical technologies." Only 30 percent agreed with the statement that "Mergers and acquisitions are not good for the SOA market, they weaken competition and threaten innovation."

The second poll was about SOA initiatives and open source. We asked how important open source was to your SOA efforts, and almost half (47 percent) said open source was "very important." Twenty percent said open source was "moderately importantly"; and 33 percent said "not important at all."Speaking of open source, one of the highlights of the week was the news that Sun was going to open-source its Web site authentication and single sign-on technology through the Open Source Web Single Sign-On, or OpenSSO project. That effort includes technology related to authentication, single domain, single sign-on, Web agents and J2EE agents. The identity management technology will be released under Sun's Common Developer and Distributed License (CDDL) program, under which Sun will help the developer community determine which innovations will continue to be developed. Sun also will be responsible for testing the technology, he said.

We also had a number of how-to pieces for you on next-generation ERP, which almost by definition involves SOA-related technologies. Remember when enterprise-resource-planning projects were risky undertakings, running way over budget and dragging on well past their deadlines? Thankfully, those times are behind most companies, but that doesn't mean Big ERP has disappeared completely. Megaprojects live on, often as extensions of the core applications installed a few years earlier.

Finally, we have an excellent in-depth feature on Microsoft's Longhorn, with our team of expert technologists analyzing every aspect of the next-generation operating system. Analysts spend a lot of time hyping the enterprise benefits of SOA (service-oriented architecture), but rarely do they discuss the benefits of a software vendor running with SOA. Microsoft's "Office as Platform" strategy does just that. The company has decided to make Office a platform for the enterprise, similar to application server platforms, but more focused on desktop productivity functions.

That's all for this week. Let me know what you think about these articles, or anything else we've posted on SOA Pipeline. And have a good one.