Research and Markets has announced the addition of “Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014” to their offering.

According to the report, IBM is the de-facto industry standard market leader in SOA. IBM dominates SOA with 64% of the market, the rest of market is divided between 12 other participants with measurable market share, none of whom have even been able to garner as much as 8% of the market.

IBM dominates the SOA infrastructure markets with more than half of the market because it has the infrastructure offering that can be used to achieve integration in a heterogeneous IT environment and solid services support to permit the large enterprises to change their business model. Acquisition activity has occurred as all the major computer software and hardware players seek to adjust to the new architectures offered by SOA. Oracle bought BEA, Software AG bought web Methods to mention only a few of the most significant acquisitions.

IBM stands alone as a leader in SOA, inventing the concept of refining reusable solutions that have been around for a long time, adding a unique component and SOA manner, by making the SOA components work to create a worldwide integrated enterprise. While the IBM SOA is able to be used as a solution that works across a global enterprise, the SOA services as implemented in a middleware infrastructure are flexible enough to provide for local variation. Services oriented architecture (SOA) represents a fundamental change in the way automated process is delivered to replace manual process.

Service enabling offerings are a response to the fundamental change in IT, where enterprise competitive advantage is gained from having IT flexibility. Software infrastructure companies have 'service enabled' their offerings in response to demand for the flexibility needed to operate a global enterprise. This service enabling of offerings represents a promise that the software vendor has the ability to build solutions that can be modified and updated in response to changing market conditions.

Enterprise IT departments use SOA to tie together the various assets and get more from the existing investment. To accomplish this, systems integration is needed to create ever changing solutions. Software infrastructure vendors need a strong middleware infrastructure as a fundamental underpinning to creating SOA that works. The ability to create and support service enabled offerings depends on having a strong middleware offering.

Many software companies do not have the basic application integration and messaging core middleware infrastructure needed to run the IT departments efficiently; thus there is a flurry of SOA activity as enterprises companies seek to acquire the right middleware technology that reduces the cost of running the IT department. Process is sequence. Information is stored in databases, but it is used as process, a sequence of events tied together with calculations and movement of information from one location to another. Process and sequence depend on integration. SOA depends on transport of messages from one service to another.

SOA is a way of implementing services that decouple application logic components and thereby facilitate rearrangement and reuse of software modules or objects. Once the software components have been decoupled, they need to be reconnected using messaging that passes transactions between the SOA components. The IBM mission critical WebSphereMQ is significant because it provides once and only once delivery of transaction messages in a secure manner. This provides the foundation of SOA. SOA is a way of exposing information from a software module through an API, through an application interface. Once a service has a way of sending information to and from the services, the decoupled components can be re-coupled in different ways. In this manner, the messaging component is significant.

There is no longer a single optimized stack, but rather independent components of a stack that may be re-coupled in any order using messaging. Physical proximity of the components of the stack is no longer a necessity; the components can interact in different ways. Web services have a messaging capability called SOAP. Java has a messaging service called JMS. Both JMS and SOAP typically use IBM MQ messaging wrappers to provide assured delivery of information from one SOA service to another. SOA engine markets depend on mature infrastructure middleware that provides the ability to consolidate integration modules with foundation architecture. IBM SOA is the software used most often in creating business integration foundation systems. SOA creates a way to organize automated process supporting modules. SOA systems are evolving to support business flexibility by enabling integration of systems dynamically. Applications are being interconnected using integration to create cross-departmental processes. Processes are implemented in real time.

Process is sequence. Information is stored in databases, but it is used as process, process imposes sequence and flow. A sequence of events tied together with calculations and movement of information from one location to another, form an application. The ability to form a SOA collaboration from component repositories and move information from one soloed application to another is implemented as process flow. Process and sequence depend on integration and SOA systems in an engine, evolved to achieve the reuse of existing software code components. SOA engines and SOA adapters and integration broker components comprise the SOA foundation product. The engine is implemented as a directory or database to control header and use of body information including date, updates, and location of scripts. The components are what are used to implement Web enabled applications.

Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) market license forecasts relate to growth of the middleware infrastructure. SOA markets at $2 billion in 2007 are expected to reach $9.1 billion by 2014. Growth comes from creating a way to reduce the cost of running an IT department by creating more automated process from software and freeing the budgets for investment in flexible response to changing market conditions.

For more information, visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c91439