Service-Oriented Architecture poised for takeoff in Asia
ConvergenceAsia staff
26/11/2007

IT market research company, Springboard Research, has announced results from its latest research on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market in Asia (excluding Japan).

Springboard estimates the region’s 2007 SOA market amounts to US$810 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 per cent, which will bring the market to US$2.2 billion by 2010. Springboard’s research further showed that Australia was the largest SOA market in the region at US$205 million.

“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 per cent 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 per cent of survey respondents instituting governance in SOA deployments and 40 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 Aggarwal. “This presents an opportunity for vendors.”

In Springboard’s analysis, IBM remained the leading SOA vendor in the region, followed 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”.

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