Service-oriented architectures (SOA) security are supposed to spell doom for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market dominated by SAP and Oracle – at least, that’s what AMR Research predicted last August.

By 2010, customers might stop buying applications from ERP vendors and instead pay low-cost integrators to “build custom composite apps that sit on top of their ERP backbone,” the analyst firm predicted. AMR called the potential scenario “death by SOA.”

But at least one SAP customer says the vendor’s ERP tool is what lets his firm embrace SOA and get the benefits of Web services and application integration . CIO Steve Strout of Morris Communications Company in Augusta, Ga., is one of many SAP customers who recently upgraded to mySAP ERP 2005.

“This application … is so different in the respect that you have services architecture built into the basic system,” Strout says. “That allows you to do so much more with this application than you have been in the past.”

Available since May 2006, the new ERP application is being adopted by customers faster than any previous program released by SAP, partly because the vendor has said it will be the “go-to-release” through 2010, according to SAP and the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG).

Strout, the executive vice president of ASUG, says the SAP ERP is a huge business management platform encompassing the general ledger, accounts payable, payroll inventory management, purchasing and many other functions. SOA features let Morris to quickly launch Web services and integrate ERP tools with CRM and customer-facing Web sites.

Morris can pick and choose where to use SOA without doing a full overhaul of the company’s IT infrastructure, Strout says.

“We’ve selected and targeted our SOA components for the things that are compelling to us, things that are going to change relatively rapidly over the next few years,” he says.

Morris Communications owns 27 daily newspapers in 14 states, radio stations in the western half of the country and has its hands in advertising and the book and magazine publishing industries.

SAP’s ERP has let Morris build a customer self-service program for newspaper subscribers, letting them, for example, request redelivery of newspapers on days they don’t receive them.