SOA Platforms: Global Trends to 2013 (Strategic Focus)

SOA has been touted as the architecture pattern for the dynamic business environment. After half of decade of intense focus on SOA, Datamonitor considers an assessment of the progress made and discussion of the future trends to be warranted. In this report, Datamonitor evaluates the success of vendors' past SOA initiatives, gauges the mood in the SOA market and suggests future strategies.

Report Highlights
The traditional industrial models of the 20th century are being abandoned in favour of dynamic, agile and networked business structures. Datamonitor believes SOA offers the architectural approach for the networked business that can help enterprises run better integrated, more flexible and transparent business processes.

SOA adoption lags that of other major enterprise technologies. However, larger enterprises are significantly more likely to have deployed SOA. The adoption of SOA technologies could be boosted by tactical use of the emerging lightweight approaches to SOA standards and implementation.

The SOA market is in flux due to consolidation, a sense of SOA fatigue and the economic turbulence. Datamonitor is convinced that the SOA market will offer great opportunities for vendors and service providers, even in times of economic uncertainly. Yet there is no place for complacency and a well-thought out go-to-market strategy will be crucial.
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Table of figures 4
Table of tables 4
Market Opportunity 5
SOA has emerged as the technology pattern for the networked organization 5
Reports of the death of SOA are greatly exaggerated 5
The higher the disruptive potential of a technology, the sterner the critique 6
The tripartite nature of SOA resists unambiguous definitions 6
SOA definitions are legion, but the emphasis is on SOA as a design pattern 6
The evolution of SOA has resulted in the proliferation of definitions 7
SOA trinity: SOA is an IT architecture pattern as well as a business strategy and set of technologies 7
SOA is a form of application virtualization that exposes functionality as technology-independent services 7
SOA is a concept, not a product, but an SOA technology stack has formed 8
SOA abstracts both technology and business logic 9
SOA is fractal 9
BPM and BAM are highly complementary to the core SOA platform 10
A core SOA platform deals with run-time execution 10
Management and monitoring modules are set to become an even more important part of the SOA platform 11
SOA platforms or ESBs? 12
SOA is driven by a combination of strategic and tactical responses to a changing world 13
Changes in application development and delivery strategies are driving SOA 13
The revival of the mainframe era through cloud service architecture is only possible with SOA 13
SOA facilitates the acquisition principle of 'compose' applications 14
IT/business alignment is the strategic link between the two domains 15
Tactical issues remain a potent driving force behind SOA initiatives 16
Application integration is easier with SOA 16
Silo busting with SOA 17
SOA rationalizes the infrastructure 17
Agility, service-orientation and process innovation are the key strategic business drivers 18
A networked economy demands agility and systems built for change 19
The switch to services is transforming the organizational structure 19
Process orientation is enabled by SOA silo busting 20
Strategic business issues open several tactical fronts in which SOA can prove its value 20
Despite compelling arguments for SOA, many potent inhibitors remain 20
SOA could be hard to justify 21
SOA could be hard to adopt 21
SOA is vulnerable to many standard pitfalls of strategic IT projects 22
Customer Impact 23
The impact of SOA is hard to gauge, but the potential market opportunity is considerable 23
Middleware is currently the least adopted mainstream enterprise technology 23
SOA adoption is difficult to gauge, but the technology is far from ubiquitous 23
Fewer than one in five enterprises have deployed SOA but adoption rates will increase 24
The SOA market can be clearly segmented by enterprise size band 24
Over one third of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees are set to adopt SOA by 2010 25
The larger the enterprise, the larger the legacy real estate 26
The SOA journey demands continuous investment 28
Datamonitor predicts that the market for SOA software will exceed $4 billion by year-end 2013 29
The SOA technology market will grow rapidly, with expansion gathering pace after 2011 29
Early adopters are seeded throughout the industries, but SOA spending remains concentrated 30
Technology Evolution 32
Layers in the SOA technology stack are increasingly well defined 32
The bottom of the stack deals with service enablement and definition 32
The service repository and the federated service bus form the core of SOA infrastructure 33
The service bus layer is logical and implementation needs to be flexible and federated 33
Service orchestration and process composition layers are converging 33
Rival approaches to the implementation standards are emerging 33
The SOA platform stack became synonymous with Web Services standards 33
WS standards form the basis of SOA platform technologies 34
The WS-* stack is widely adopted but doubts regarding implementation are increasing 35
WS standards are verbose, inflexible and overly specified 35
WS standards rarely excel at what the name implies 35
RESTful protocols are emerging as lightweight alternative to WS-* 36
REST is the Internet reverse-engineered 36
REST architecture uses ubiquitous W3C standards instead of WS-* protocols 36
WOA can be built on REST and other Internet-based protocols 37
WS-* or REST? SOA or WOA? 38
SOA technology vendors will support both approaches to service-orientation 38
Competitive Landscape 40
The competitive landscape is shaped by the maturation of SOA platform technologies 40
Enterprise application vendors aim to provide next-generation application platforms through SOA 40
Application platform conglomerates see SOA as the way to derive value from application suites 41
Application and middleware conglomerates intend to provide support both for business and technology 42
Middleware conglomerates are caught between top-down and bottom-up approaches to SOA 43
The Big Three middleware vendors are taking up the challenges of strategically-driven SOA 43
Middleware conglomerates that focus exclusively on composite application development may struggle 44
SOA specialists have an opportunity to capitalize on commoditization and ride the trend of lightweight SOA 44
Success in the SOA market can come from either a top-down or bottom-up approach 46
Application conglomerates and the middleware Big Three compete for strategic deployments 46
Bottom-up adoption strategy will broaden the appeal of SOA 47
Go to Market 49
The future of SOA depends on the optimal go-to-market strategy 49
Datamonitor predicts significant IT budget retrenchment in 2009 49
Enterprise priorities are changing fast as they seek to cope with economic turbulence 50
Vendors should positioning SOA as a pragmatic 'make do and mend' technology 52
Strategic agility never goes out of fashion, but 2009 may not be the year of high-risk strategies 52
SOA vendors should adopt long-term account strategies and drive an incremental SOA approach 52
Consider open-source and hybrid proprietary/open-source portfolios 52
Deploy just enough complexity to cater for the initial project and expand the portfolio incrementally 53
Measure the impact of SOA and weave compelling narratives to justify further investments 54
Use vertical expertise to address current business pain-points specific to individual industries 55
Tough economic times call for bold marketing strategies 56
APPENDIX 57
Definitions 57
Methodology 58
Further reading 58
Ask the analyst 58
Datamonitor consulting 58
Disclaimer 58
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Table 1: Current adoption and the predicted maximum adoption of SOA by enterprise size band 26
Table 2: What proportion of your applications would you consider to be legacy applications? 27
Table 3: Planned SOA investment by enterprise size-band 28
Table 4: How do you expect your IT budget to change in '09 compared to '08? 50
Table 5: What are your major strategic goals for this year (Rate 1 to 4, 1=not influential; 4=highly influential) 51
Figure 1: Businesses are evolving from the industrial to the networked era 5
Figure 2: SOA can be defined as a trinity of IT architecture, business strategy and technology 7
Figure 3: Core SOA reference architecture 8
Figure 4: Service composites can appear as monolithic units or higher-order services 9
Figure 5: The SOA stack and immediately adjacent technologies 11
Figure 6: SOA is driven by strategic and tactical aims in the business and IT domain 13
Figure 7: In the first quarter of the 21st century enterprises will compose, not buy or build, applications 14
Figure 8: Aligning IT with business goals is a growing concern for CIOs 15
Figure 9: Over half of enterprises are overwhelmed by application maintenance workload 18
Figure 10: Middleware technologies, including SOA, achieve the lowest rate of adoption 23
Figure 11: Fewer than one in five enterprises have adopted SOA, but penetration is set to increase 24
Figure 12: SOA, BPM and enterprise portals are deployed primarily within large organizations 25
Figure 13: Enterprises with over 5,000 employees are twice as likely to adopt SOA than smaller organizations 25
Figure 14: The proportion of legacy applications increases with enterprise size, pushing SOA adoption further 27
Figure 15: Most enterprises are making continuous investments in SOA 28
Figure 16: Software licensing revenues associated with SOA technologies are set to triple by 2013 29
Figure 17: Telecommunications and financial services will remain the principal focuses of spending 31
Figure 18: The SOA stack can be decomposed in six functional layers 32
Figure 19: Datamonitor segments SOA platform vendors into three categories and five sub-categories 40
Figure 20: SOA Platforms Decision Matrix: technology assessment and market impact scores only 45
Figure 21: Combined Datamonitor BPM/SOA Decision Matrix - integration assessment included 46
Figure 22: Combined Datamonitor BPM/SOA Decision Matrix - integration assessment as of Q4 '08 included 47
Figure 23: Enterprises are cutting back on their IT budgets in H2 2008 49
Figure 24: IT departments are focusing on the core tasks of running efficient IT infrastructures 51
Figure 25: Enterprises most likely to invest in SOA prefer direct vendor relationships and systems integrators 54
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