It’s a truism that you don’t have to buy software to deliver on SOA, which is primarily a style of technical architecture and business strategy and isn’t really something you can go out and purchase.

But it’s also true that enabling software can make the job of delivering on SOA 10x easier. Or on occasion, though hopefully not, much worse (10x harder.) But if software can indeed really help make the transition to SOA faster and easier, then the situation today is increasingly becoming a head-to-head competition between commercial and open source SOA solutions..

It should be pointed out that the technical support for SOA, at least in terms of creating interoperable services, has long been built into most modern development stacks today, whether that is .NET, J2EE, and to a lesser degree even the now-rapidly proliferating cloud computing platforms.

However — especially when it comes to the full spectrum of SOA requirements — no pure play development platform has it all when it comes to the technical capabilities of the modern SOA with its need for many flavors of service, management, metering, security, and the need to easily connect to hundreds of types of underlying datasets. This means that despite whatever technology platforms you’re using today, you’ll either need to develop additional SOA capabilities, buy them, or increasingly, adopt a community-based solution.

Thus many of today’s enterprise-class SOA efforts have made investments of some kind in software to support development, testing, security, management, and governance across today’s service-oriented architecture spectrum. Credible open source alternatives to commercial SOA products have been emerging for quite a while now but I’m only now seeing a relatively sudden and noticeable uptick in both interest in as well as the completeness of the offerings themselves.

Part of this is no doubt the recession and is due to cost sensitivity, but the rest is the compelling nature and maturity of the latest open source SOA offerings. The transparency of and ability to influence open source projects continues to be no small factor either as implementers struggle with more opaque less-frequently updated commercial products..

Since SOA can and should be highly strategic to the way companies operate at their core, deciding to build on community-built solutions can feel like a big step that is rife with implications for those who may have to bet their career on their SOA decisions. This brings us full circle back to the title of this piece: Is open source, a world that’s more steeped in the sometimes anti-establishment free software movement and consumer Web development, really going to deliver on the increasingly sophisticated requirements of serious “big enterprise” SOA efforts?

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