Will vendors ever get serious about the 'unserved' SOA market?

You know the drill. Vendors trip over each other working to reach the Big Enchiladas -- the enterprise SOA market, the Global 1000s.

It's like that Capital One commercial, where one stuffy banker says to the other, "...but we only care about BIG business!"

Of course, everyone pays lip service to that great, vast SMB in the sky. (small to medium business) But SMBs are the fruit higher up on the trees. They're fickle, they have limited budgets, and the people making purchase decisions wear multiple hats -- everything vendors hate.

Hence, SMBs remain the great unserved (or underserved) market. One of the most consistent criticisms of SOA vendors is that they push expensive software and service arrangements on companies, promising more agility, but with no guarantee of successful outcomes. And, of course, these offerings are beyond the reach of the budgets of most smaller companies. SOA just has not been a small company thing.

Open source, in combination with SOA, may bring SOA closer to the masses. On Monday, SOA Software and Red Hat announced a partnership in which SOA Software would supply governance and management capabilities to open source SOA projects.

JBoss is an interesting story because it's main goal in life has been to make SOA-compliant middleware available to the masses. Its target market is the small business sector, as well as departments within larger enterprises. More than anything, the open source convergence with SOA may be more of a disruptive force than anything else.

A couple of days back, I had the opportunity to chat with Hugh Taylor, VP of marketing for SOA Software, and Shaun Connolly, VP of product management for Red Hat/JBoss, about such implications. First of all, by teaming up, SOA Software and JBoss clearly are looking at building up a suite-like capability that will compete with the likes of Oracle, IBM, and BEA. With one clear difference -- SOA SOftware/JBoss are targeting the great "unserved" market in a serious way.

Shaun pointed out that the unserved market consists of "the people who have to roll their own, because they can't afford the licenses for the [SOA] projects they're doing. That's why we've been very diligently building out on top of our application platform, the business process, business rules, and portal-based offerings. That's why we're focused on our ESB-based service integration and orchestration platform."

Hugh states that small-business SOA is being propelled by the trading requirements of the larger companies. "You might have a very large company, like a Boeing, or Ford Motors, which will specify a SOAP-based interface, or connecting with a supply chain that may affect a lot of smaller companies. They'll need to have a solution that they can use to be a part of it. That's the sort of leadership that will drive SOA adoption to smaller companies."