SOA moves markets

SOA is moving markets, especially the moving markets.

A report out of ARC Advisory Group says the transportation management systems (TMS) market grew to almost a billion dollars last year, and parts of the industry grew by 11 percent. ARC is forecasting the market to exceed $1.3 billion by 2010, representing a compounded annual growth rate of 6.9%.

ARC says this growth is occurring thanks to SOA, which is opening up transportation management to all parts of enterprises:

"In the past, access to a TMS was usually limited to a handful of people within a company, but now hundreds or even thousands of users can log in to a TMS to execute processes or access information, depending on their role and access privileges," said Adrian Gonzalez, ARC analyst and author of the new report. “TMS is migrating away from being a standalone, monolithic application used by only a handful of transportation users to a platform where users across the value chain can execute role-specific, transportation-related business processes via configurable user interfaces, workflows, and Web services."

UPS and Fedex have grabbed the SOA bull by the horn in this regard. A couple of years back in this blog, I talked about the SOA/Web services efforts at Con-Way Transportation, which has enabled its seven separate business units to share standardized customer-facing applications.