Report: SOA middleware market will more than double by 2016

WinterGreen Research has just issued a report that predicts the global SOA application middleware market -- estimated at about $3.5 billion -- will grow to at least $8.2 billion in the next six years. A lot of growth will be fueled by the rise of cloud computing, which has re-energized interest in the SOA approach to life.

That's 134% growth during this time, or more than 15% a year. Not too shabby. Of course, the IT world has always been full of multi-billion-dollar market estimates that are too big to comprehend.

But what's really nice about this announcement is that the press release actually spells out what the researchers mean by "SOA application middleware," so we get a sense of where this demand is coming from, versus some vague "SOA market," which could mean every piece of software and services on the planet. WinterGreen provides the following parameters:

• "Software middleware accesses APIs which are the mechanisms for extracting data from applications, typically used originally for printing information from an application, but in the Internet era, for electronic communications of data from an application."
• "SOA middleware provides access to applications. The transport layer used by the Internet HTTP, HTTPS, and Java message service JMS is being upgraded in many cases to message services that are MQ based from several vendors, offering mission critical transport."

The value with SOA is that it "can leverage the Internet and Internet-based standards," and "has the potential to dramatically increase automated process between partners," WinterGreen says. Benefits of SOA relate to "more effective integration with business partners, better supply chain collaboration, increased global sourcing and more effective use of external service providers."

WinterGreen also connects the dots between SOA application middleware and the emerging cloud paradigm. "As cloud markets evolve and users only pay for the capacity they use, SOA becomes a significant aspect of all markets going forward. SOA strategies relate to providing a middleware to manage different application access in ways that position software with a more flexible capability." This is fueled by the rise of platform-as-a-service and integration-as-a-service offerings as part of the cloud formation, the report adds.