OASIS this week announced formation of a committee to develop a reference model for SOAs. Now, if the major vendors in this space would only show some enthusiasm.Inquiries were made by myself to Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle and BEA Systems about their interest in this endeavor. Only Oracle, to its credit, has responded to me, and the prognosis was not good. In short, Oracle said, “Given the pace of standardization, profiling and vendor offerings at this point, it is premature to converge on a single reference architecture.”What is the problem with a reference architecture? Standards are good, aren’t they? All these companies claim to back standards. We sure don’t want nonstandardized, proprietary SOAs popping up now, do we? Well? Hopefully, all these companies, whose support is critical, will get with the program and endorse the OASIS effort, if they’re not quietly doing so already. Software Development