SOA Market In Asia Poised For Take-Off

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) market in Asia (excluding Japan) reached an estimated US $810 million in 2007 and, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent, will reach US $2.2 billion by 2010, according to Springboard Research. Springboard’s research further showed that IBM remained the leading SOA vendor in the region, where “proven products and solutions” is cited as the most important reason for choosing an SOA vendor.

“SOA continues to gain traction in the market as more companies are either implementing SOA or are planning to do so,” said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, Senior Analyst of Emerging Software for Springboard Research. “Awareness has increased substantially in the last year, and we are now seeing that translate into healthier adoption levels across Asia,” Aggarwal added.

The primary SOA drivers in Asia are improved service delivery in increasingly competitive markets and improved integration at both the data and application levels. The leading service delivery improvements enabled by SOA cited by respondents included reducing the time and cost of delivering services, making services sharable across the enterprise and more flexible and reusable services. Although equally important, integration appears to be emerging as an enabler supporting the improved service delivery objective.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are also strong drivers for SOA deployment with 49% of the firms surveyed that had experienced M&A deploying SOA to integrate the IT systems of the merged companies. Governance is also continuing to become more important with 85% of survey respondents instituting governance in SOA deployments and 40% having a structure integrated from the beginning of implementation.

“While SOA continues to do well in the region, users still have some challenges. The main challenge with SOA deployment as named by survey respondents is managing performance and scalability, and 21% mentioned this difficulty as their number one area of concern,” said Aggarwal. “Additionally, SOA is still largely a technology initiative led by IT managers as indicated by 68% of our surveyed respondents; as such, SOA has mainly been a technology-driven investment instead of an investment focused on addressing clear-cut business goals,” added Ms. Aggarwal. “This presents an opportunity for vendors.”

In Springboard’s analysis, IBM remained the leading SOA vendor in the region, followed by other strong SOA players such as Microsoft, BEA, HP, SAP, Tibco and Oracle. From its end-user survey, Springboard found that respondents named “proven products and solutions” as the most important reason for choosing an SOA vendor, followed by “clearly defined roadmap for deployment” and “vendor reputation”.

Springboard Research ranks Australia as the largest SOA market in the region in 2007 at US $205 million.