Service-oriented architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggled to tell the proper SOA story for their products in a way that leads to increased sales and happy customers. The reason SOA presents such a formidable challenge is at once both subtle and obvious. After all, SOA is architecture -- it is a set of best practices enterprises follow to organize their IT resources to meet the needs of the business. SOA, however, is not, and never will be, a set of product features. And therein lies the rub. How do you position your product as a SOA product when SOA consists of best practices, not product features?

SOA and the Tin Woodman

For both product management (what features should our products have?) and product marketing (how do we differentiate our products' value propositions in the marketplace?), the focus has always been on product features. Product management meets with customers to elicit requirements, which start with business problems they'd like the product to solve, but invariably end up with a discussion of desirable features. Product management then takes those requirements to engineering, who adds them to the product. Product marketing then takes over, figuring out how best to position the features of the product to gain the attention of prospects, differentiate their products from their competition, and then convince prospects to purchase the products.