I understand the perception that any given proprietary software company makes big, bulky software that's brittle, difficult to change, and locks you into their product line. Yet what I'm seeing out of SAP Labs, and everything Tim saw and reported on in his Radar post (http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/sap-as-a-web-20-company.html) argues that SAP is much more open than we'd thought. Maybe for now that openness doesn't extend to the source code to all of their SAP DLLs, but everything I've seen has made effective use of open standards.

I think I've misjudged the company, and perhaps you have too. (Though I'm am still somewhat skeptical about SOA....)