SOA  Market  Expanding

The market for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is seeing a huge increase and there is a fundamental commitment to SOA as the future of process and application design, according to a recent survey.

The survey report, done by the Link Group, which drew more than 4,200 technical and business leaders from around the world, said more than 4,500 organizations have modeled their businesses around SOA, a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align IT with business goals, helping to result in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity. Globally SOA is a USD 160 billion industry and rising fast.

The survey found both significant increases in budgets and the number of SOA projects aimed at new business challenges with 40 per cent of respondents indicating that between 10-30 per cent of overall IT budgets are being spent on SOA projects.  Additionally, 53 per cent of respondents indicated that their budgets for SOA projects for 2007 increased between 10-20 per cent compared to 2006.

The survey also revealed that 67 per cent of the respondents said the key decision makers responsible for moving to an SOA strategy are business leaders including C-level executives and business managers.  Additionally, 65 per cent of clients said that business leaders are also primarily responsible for selecting an IT partner to help achieve business goals in an SOA.

In their survey of 680 Asia Pacific (including Japan) companies, Dr. Patrick Chan, Research Director of Asia-Pacific Emerging Technologies Research at IDC, explained that most IT project managers have positive attitudes and strong understanding of SOA with mid-sized and larger corporations with more budget power. These are likely to adopt SOA in their organization within the next 1 - 2 years.

"Business leaders not engaged in the SOA decision making process will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage," said Dan Powers, Vice President, Worldwide SOA, IBM.  "With its focus on optimizing and automating specific business processes and eliminating redundant ones, it is business leaders that will drive the adoption of SOA from early stages to enterprise wide adoption."

An additional finding was that 75 per cent of respondents said the primary reason for implementing SOA was to meet new business goals versus 25 percent that cited fixing existing business problems.

Sept. 7, 2007