To be truly successful with their service oriented architecture (SOA) efforts, businesses must find a way of stimulating collaborative thinking to bring together the necessary people from disparate parts of the organisation.

So says Roman Stanek, HP's SOA director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), who addressed an audience of architects at BEA Systems' Arch2Arch Summit in Nice this week by telling them that one of the main SOA hurdles they must clear is to find a way of getting people who aren't used to or don't want to work side by side to do so.

"I've been working on SOA [for a number of years] and I believe we're still scratching the surface of what's needed," he said, adding that there are three main parties involved in SOA, the people that build the strategy, the service providers and then the people that consume that service.