Several companies have joined in an attempt to extend specifications for service-oriented architecture (SOA) to include a language-neutral model. However, there have been some critics who believe this effort is redundant, given work that is already in progress in the Java Community Process. The proposed Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Service Data Objects (SDO) specifications, which are related, are designed to simplify the creation of business services for accessing data that is stored in several locations and formats. The effort is led by IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, and several other firms. Eric Newcomer, the chief technology officer of Iona, believes the project will close the gap between the types of service interfaces that developers want to build and language-specific objects or programmers that exist in a typical organization. Newcomer notes that Web services are about interfaces for messaging, and behind the interfaces can be many platforms that require a large amount of coding before services can be implemented. Mark Nehaus, vice president of Java Web services at Sun Microsystems, worries about the SCA effort stepping on previous work. The main difference between Sun's effort and SCA lies in the intended purpose of each. Sun wants to standardize the assembly of integration components so users can construct best-of-breed solutions from multiple vendors, while SCA focuses on helping enterprise developers create SOA software on the application level.