The Cape Clear philosophy is that SOA needs a high performance ESB, especially for on-demand software as a service (SaaS), but not the stack that the major vendors are marketing. O'Toole openly acknowledges wanting to spark a debate on the future of SOA between companies like his and SOA stack vendors. Meanwhile, analysts interviewed for this article said while he may be promoting his pure play approach, he may also be right about the dangers of SOA over-sell.

"Over the last year or so as some of the bigger vendors have come into the marketplace, their strategy has been to turn SOA into this kind of massive bloated animal," O'Toole said. "We've gone from SOA being all about speed and time to market to being these massive SOA stacks. The big guys come along and say in order to do SOA you need an ESB, you need BAM, you need BPM, you need a registry. They've turned it into this extremely complex, hard to use beast."