This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.By Ronald Schmelzer

　　In a previous ZapFlash, ZapThink opined that Open Source Software could play an important role in your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure. Certainly, there were no architectural reasons why it couldn’t.

　　As we explained in that article, the primary biases against OSS (if there are any) are from the people in the organization who have fear, uncertainty, or doubt about the risks or benefits of OSS.

　　But of course, that article spoke at a fairly general level. Individual implementations or products might be better than others, or more suited for specific problems than others. This is where Enterprise Architects should spend their time focused – on the specific solutions to specific problems, rather than engaging in religious battles about the merits of entire classes of solutions.

　　Unfortunately, in addition to the biases against OSS, many companies have developed aversions to solutions from startup companies. Yet, in an environment where we are left with just a handful of incumbent companies remaining in the SOA infrastructure landscape, and these vendors have confusing collections of often conflicting and competitive infrastructure products, it might be a good time to revisit utilizing solutions from niche, best-of-breed, and often startup, solutions in your SOA environment.

　　However, how do you do so without incurring substantial real or perceived risk? After all, it is the nature of a startup company to change, be acquired, or die. In this environment, EAs need to become wholeheartedly selfish: meet the requirements of the business in an agile manner by reducing the penalty for failure. In such an environment, startup solutions are not only feasible, but very appropriate.

　　Best of breed in an increasingly suite world

　　Through a combination of consolidation, maturation, and the pressures of a tough economic environment, the landscape of enterprise IT software players has dwindled to a handful of companies that control the infrastructure for a vast majority of companies.

　　Just like the auto industry experienced a period of rapid growth and diversity in the early part of the 20thcentury, only to consolidate down to the “Big three” in the United States and a similar number in countries around the world, we are now faced with the reality of a “Big Five” set of vendors in the enterprise IT marketplace, especially in the area of SOA infrastructure.

　　Agility is a key benefit of SOA, which means that properly designed architectures should not only be implementation-neutral, they should be fairly immune to infrastructural change.

　　However, consolidation is not always a friend of innovation. Many have argued that the consolidation of the auto industry in the US by the late 1970s resulted in products that were unable to compete with offerings from overseas.