For example, the most startling change in strategy comes from SAP, long the dominant player in ERP. For years, SAP resisted alliances with other software vendors and insisted on building its own applications. But post-SOA, SAP is busy service-enabling its applications and using its new middleware software, NetWeaver, to entice companies to build software to run on the NetWeaver platform (which incorporates Web services standards). Online CRM software provider Salesforce.com has created AppExchange, where developers can download free software to integrate their software add-ons with Salesforce’s core software. Oracle, meanwhile, has been busy building its platform through acquisitions, including middleware software that is the linchpin for its SOA pitch.

With CIOs reluctant to upgrade to new versions of enterprise software, the big vendors are saying, "Look, we can’t sell with our old value proposition anymore," says Gartner’s Sholler. "So they’re trying to make [their software] the foundation for other solutions in markets they haven’t been able to reach."

But this strategy has put the enterprise application companies on a collision course with traditional middleware providers such as BEA, IBM and WebMethods, which are coming to the SOA party from the bottom up, through the integration infrastructure layer. "Everybody is winding up tangled up in the same space," says Sholler.

Although the integration infrastructure companies have much more experience with the foundational elements of SOA, all vendors are looking to build long-term relationships with customers. Consequently, despite the abundance of Web services standards embedded in their products to ease integration headaches, everybody has a proprietary hook somewhere. Oracle’s Fusion applications will work only with Oracle’s database. SAP’s new applications require NetWeaver middleware, according to Gartner and Forrester Research. Even the integration infrastructure companies have enough proprietary elements to make it difficult to swap out their integration software.

The bottom line for CIOs? Beware vendors pledging to build your SOA for you. Unless, like Whirlpool’s Sezer, you’re not worried about dependence on your vendor, which in Sezer’s case happens to be SAP. "What’s wrong with being dependent on a vendor as long as I’m providing value to my company with the solution?" he asks.

But CIOs on the whole fear dependency, especially in the current wave of consolidation, according to a 2005 Accenture survey of CIOs. While 65 percent of CIOs said vendor consolidation makes for a more integrated software infrastructure, and 61 percent believe it will reduce their vendor management burden, 87 percent said vendor consolidation will lead to lock-in, 61 percent believe it will decrease price competition, and 57 percent believe it will reduce pressures for vendors to innovate. Only 35 percent saw vendor consolidation as a good thing.