The IDE business has been a dying breed for about 10 years. It's really hard to compete with free?especially when the free stuff is really good.

The idea is that down the road all this stuff magically starts working together, and at that point you have this ability to assemble application systems from these shared reusable services. Of course, that is the dream behind Web services in the first place.

Once the chickens are out of the hen house, it's harder to get them back inside.

It's questionable, though, how long it will take for the Red Hat sales and marketing team to gain competence in selling an application platform, which is much further 'up the stack' than the operating system.

It's remarkable that they've been able to hang on and remain a reasonably sized company. They were not going to survive trying to be an IDE (integrated development environment) company because nobody pays for IDEs anymore.

There's a lot of smaller vendors doing real cutting-edge things and they've become pretty good at working together.

I've been berating the ESB market because it's lacking in governance. This purchase really addresses that for Sonic.

Everybody I'm now talking to is working on SOA. People have at least an inkling of what it means and they're starting to plan it.

The fact that they changed the data model is my biggest concern. It forces us to learn something different. All the tooling you had to compile the old WSDL will not work anymore.

You can find WS-Security in all SOA products, but almost no one's using it. It's amazing how few people are using it.