SOA market will double, but will success stories follow?
AMR Research just released a study that predicts the overall SOA market will double over the next four years, from the current spending level 0f $28 billion to $52 billion. Individually, the average SOA adopter spent nearly $1.4 million on such efforts in 2007, with close to half spending over $500,000 on SOA software and services, AMR estimates.
Could SOA become a $52-billion boondoggle? Or only $9 billion?
AMR's numbers are far more expansive than the $2 billion estimate issued by Research and Markets a couple of months back -- which also projected growth to $9 billion by 2014.
At least 77 percent of companies will have SOA initiatives underway by 2012, AMR adds.
This is a huge spend for something that other analysts are saying has been a stunning failure so far. Around the same time AMR released its estimates, Burton Group revealed that in its latest study of 20 companies implementing SOA, only four could be considered to be successes thus far.
Thus, what analysts are telling us is that we're going to be spending billions upon billions on SOA, but so far, few companies have been able to get it to work the way it should.
AMR's Ian Finley, co-author of the current study, said as much earlier this year -- that companies are spending a lot on SOA, but with little rhyme or reason to the spending. “Hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested pursuing these markets in 2008, much of it wasted,” he said. Why is the money being wasted? Finley says there is not single driving focus for SOA. Instead, companies end up investing in SOA for a range of reasons, often unrelated individual priorities.
In the new AMR report, Finley and co-author Bob Kraus said that SOA has some important strengths, including the fact that "it’s universally acknowledged as the best approach to building and integrating business applications." Once a company is comfortable with SOA, they say, "it triggers little incremental spending, but commands the budget that would have been spent on older technology."
Which begs a couple of questions: If not SOA, what? And, if that $9 billion to $52 billion doesn't get spent on SOA projects, how much will the world be spending to keep older systems and processes going as they were? Would it add up to a lot more than $52 billion?