SOA Trading Blocs

In his post SOA USA EU, Radovan suggests that the USA is more service-oriented than the EU. He points to the difficulties of interoperability across national, linguistic and cultural boundaries.

We may note that when services (such as call centres) are outsourced to India, this typically relies on imposing an alien culture and outmoded management practices on the Indian call centre operations, in order to side-step some of these issues. See previous post.

Let me extend Radovan's speculation as follows. America may have the advantage in moving from phase 1 of SOA to phase 2. But Europe may have the advantage in moving from phase 2 to phase 3. (If anyone has got any evidence either way, please post using the service-oriented tag.)

Phase 1	SOA within a single enterprise - vertical (hierarchical) coordination
Phase 2	SOA within a relatively simple homogeneous community - closed network coordination
Phase 3	SOA across a complex heterogeneous landscape - open network coordination

This then raises a secondary question: which platform vendors will be best placed to support the move from phase 2 to phase 3, with its complex issues of semantics and trust - American or European ones?