Here's an interesting take on Web Services and IT vendors:

Can big vendors give up tight coupling? For all the lip service they pay to web services, it may not be in the best interests of big vendors to encourage their customers to move to a more loosely coupled IT architecture. This was an idea that came out quite strongly during the preparation of this week's article on web services integration by enterprise software vendors. Having assembled the research, it became quite evident that established vendors are just adding a web services veneer to their products, but they'd still much rather have customers base their IT around a single vendor's suite. Therefore, any enterprise that really does want to realize the benefits of web services will have to turn to a web services integration and management platform from one of the specialist startups, rather than relying on companies like SAP or Oracle to pave the way for them

I thought that was perfectly clear - this is just the latest iteration on "open systems" to come down the pike. Nothing much has changed, other than the acronyms (X/Open, anyone?). Same game, heck, some of the same vendors. The more things change, the more they stay the same....