SOA needs medium market

Johannesburg, 19 Jun 2007

Butler Group, a European IT research organisation, has published a report on the competitive nature of the market for service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployment technologies.

According to the report, titled SOA Platforms, SOA vendors need to acquire a 'critical mass' market share in order to sustain the ongoing development investment that will be needed, and to prosper in a market that is set to become commoditised.

"The high adoption rate of SOA has attracted a large and diverse set of software vendors to compete for market share in the provision of the supporting infrastructure. As the market starts to mature, it is inevitable that vendor consolidation, which is already significant, will accelerate further," says Rob Hailstone, software infrastructure practice director at Butler Group.

The report analyses 13 SOA infrastructure vendors and deals with a comparison of these vendors through eight categories: quality of service, messaging, standards, transformations, adapters and connectors, orchestration, business rules, and integrated development environment.

The analysis identifies Oracle, TIBCO and IBM as vendors that should be shortlisted because of their ability to support strategic deployment of architecture. However, the company says different deployment scenarios emphasise different sets of capabilities.

Changing focus

The report shows industry conditions are constantly changing, and in this maturing market, the number of competing vendors will decrease through acquisitions, mergers and vendors deciding unilaterally to target different markets.

Butler Group says the industry has been dominated by high-value, low-volume sales, because vendors primarily target large enterprises. Butler Group predicts this will start to change within two or three years as the large enterprise market starts to become saturated.

"Business drivers will soon stretch beyond the present expectation of greater IT responsiveness. In the future, business managers will expect to be able to define a policy, and to have that policy implemented directly by the IT infrastructure, with minimal involvement from IT staff. The automation of different types of business policies will be a major feature of the forthcoming IT landscape," says Hailstone.

The company says the need to address medium-sized enterprises will impact not just sales and marketing strategies, but also the products themselves, with ease-of-use and reduced administration being prerequisites to mid-market success.