Business
SOA: Who's running this show?
I heard from Loosely Coupled's Phil Wainewright the other day, who shared the results of an SOA management market survey he just published. Loosely Coupled took a hard look at the 14 vendors that play in this space, and estimates that the size of the market stood at about $60 million at the end of 2004.
I heard from Loosely Coupled's Phil Wainewright the other day, who shared the results of an SOA management market survey he just published. Loosely Coupled took a hard look at the 14 vendors that play in this space, and estimates that the size of the market stood at about $60 million at the end of 2004. However, the SOA management tools market will more than triple in size over the next ten months, Phil predicts. "As more projects come online and SOA strategies mature at largercompanies, we project market value will reach close to $200 million."
Loosely Coupled estimates that are fewer than 80 significant SOA production projects worldwide(defined as more than $100,000 in value), but more than half are at blue-chiporganizations.
Interestingly, Loosely Coupled found that virtually all of these early efforts have entrusted their projects to small specialist firms, and not the established, big-name vendors. Names that popped up at production sites included Actional, AmberPoint, Digital Evolution, and Oblix. Of course, the report notes, while heavyweights such as BEA Systems, HP, and IBM have not brought complete SOA management products to market yet, they will "make a major impact when they do."
Loosely Coupled also observes that important new categories of SOA management are evolving within available product lines. For instance, "several vendors have put policy management at the core of their
products, moving management on execution of business policy and security within the infrastructure." Governance features -- which enable organizations to register, track and document services within an SOA -- are also coming online.
A bowl of spaghetti is a great meal, but a terrible way to organize a service-oriented architecture. Because Web services are inherently democratic -- we all will be both producers and consumers of various services -- it's bound to be a messy spaghetti architecture of point-to-point interfaces. Management tools need to preserve the grassroots appeal and flexibility of SOA while streamlining and centralizing the development and implementation process.
Loosely Coupled estimates that are fewer than 80 significant SOA production projects worldwide(defined as more than $100,000 in value), but more than half are at blue-chiporganizations.
Interestingly, Loosely Coupled found that virtually all of these early efforts have entrusted their projects to small specialist firms, and not the established, big-name vendors. Names that popped up at production sites included Actional, AmberPoint, Digital Evolution, and Oblix. Of course, the report notes, while heavyweights such as BEA Systems, HP, and IBM have not brought complete SOA management products to market yet, they will "make a major impact when they do."
Loosely Coupled also observes that important new categories of SOA management are evolving within available product lines. For instance, "several vendors have put policy management at the core of their
products, moving management on execution of business policy and security within the infrastructure." Governance features -- which enable organizations to register, track and document services within an SOA -- are also coming online.
A bowl of spaghetti is a great meal, but a terrible way to organize a service-oriented architecture. Because Web services are inherently democratic -- we all will be both producers and consumers of various services -- it's bound to be a messy spaghetti architecture of point-to-point interfaces. Management tools need to preserve the grassroots appeal and flexibility of SOA while streamlining and centralizing the development and implementation process.