I’ve been reading a lot lately about the growing importance of SOA and newer, more flexible middleware options for use within the enterprise. Recent acquisitions have certainly highlighted this, such as Oracle’s purchase of BEA systems just a few weeks ago, Sun Microsystem’s acquisition of MySQL, and just yesterday SpringSource’s procurement of Covalent (see below). The latter two are certainly representative of open source’s growing popularity within enterprise middleware, and while BEA and Oracle would never be confused as open source providers, both have supported open source initiatives in the past, either outside the company or internally within product development.

Open source’s growing popularity within big business is thanks largely to the significant inroads that it’s made in middleware deployments. More and more open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA to the enterprise. If and when Oracle ever gets all its ducks in a row and integrates BEA middleware into Fusion, or visa versa, it would certainly be a stronger SOA alternative to Microsoft and .NET. With many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded, open source middleware will provide a simple and affordable platform on which to integrate SOA into the enterprise.