In my last newsletter, I discussed the growing generation gap between Enterprise Service Bus platforms from established vendors such as Oracle and Tibco and the new breed of modular products being developed by a new generation of vendors. Most traditional ESB products have evolved from earlier Enterprise Application Integration platforms. While they serve as an indispensable bridge between EAI and Web services-based service-oriented architecture, they are based on monolithic code sets with roots in legacy software platforms.

Today, this new breed of vendors, and some established ones, are bringing products to market that go beyond simply paying lip service to the benefits of SOA. These platforms are themselves SOA or Web services implementations, and reap all of the advantages of modular, standards-based architectures, including ease of maintenance and extensibility.

Traditional coding techniques are inflexible and complex to modify. With solution sets incorporating potentially millions of lines of code, modifications are time-consuming and expensive. For this reason, many of today's largest ESB vendors are struggling with the titanic task of building SOA concepts and Web services support into huge technology stacks.

The new generation of SOA vendors is leveraging SOA and/or Web services for the same reasons their customers are - to build in interoperability, lower the cost of adding new functionality, and leverage standards. Some, such as Altiris and Microsoft, are building very flexible systems over Web services-based componentized architectures such as .Net. Others, such as WebMethods, are developing their products from scratch as SOA-based or, in the case of AmberPoint's SOA Management System 5.0, rewriting products to take advantage of SOA's flexibility.

The WebMethods ServiceNet Registry and SOA Management solution were written from the ground up as SOA implementations. The result is that, as first generation vendors such as Tibco and Oracle struggle to unify point solutions, WebMethods is able to leverage its own intrinsic architecture to easily integrate with other products and to extend functionality.

AmberPoint took a courageous step forward in this fast-paced marketplace and rewrote SOA Management System as an SOA-based implementation. The new product is a flexible, policy-driven system in which the AmberPoint policy library supports not just end-user SOA solutions, but the AmberPoint system itself. This kind of re-architecture, previously almost unheard of in the product world, is beginning to dot the vendor landscape.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.