Despite strong SOA suite offerings emerging in the market by IBM, Oracle and Sun leading up to 2009, the impact of the global economic crisis gave sufficient pause to those organisations not already committed to major business application transformation that SOA has remained on the backburner. Fortunately this same pause provided an ideal time for further consolidation of the middleware and adjacent application development markets with major transactions such as Oracle’s acquisition of Sun and Micro Focus’ takeover of Borland, along with smaller scale events such as Progress Software’s acquisition of Savvion and IBM’s of Lombardi.