SOA: Just what is a SOA services company, anyway? Most IT folks might conjure infrastructure providers. But, clearly, there’s more to it than that, as David Linthicum learned at the SOA Kongress last week in Germany. Think APIs. Google has a bunch of them, and collectively they prove that “the ‘outside-in services’ notion is coming true. It’s just a matter of time before major enterprise-class services come out of the Web as well, not to mention semantic management, governance, security, and all of the on-demand management that’s needed with those services,” Linthicum explains. Q&A: Vendor cooperation is the key to data security, explains Dennis Hoffman, EMC’s vice president and general manager of enterprise solutions at the RSA division. Hoffman also headed up EMC’s security efforts before the RSA acquisition. “The interesting thing is that there’s no difference in the strategy before and after,” he says in this interview. Open source: Open source databases are cheaper, TCO-wise, than proprietary alternatives, right? At least that’s what Forrester Research found. The analyst firm claims that no license fees and less expensive management tools mean the average savings on total cost of ownership for EnterpriseDB, Ingres, MySQL and others is at least 50 percent. The news beat: Salesforce.com this week is announcing the ApexConnect tool for integrating on-demand applications with back-end systems. Analyst house Ovum predicts that Windows Vista adoption will outpace XP. And Google reaches an accord with two Belgian press groups that will allow it to use their content in ways that go beyond copyright law. Technology Industry