For enterprises, the adoption of SOA provides significant potential to improve the value they derive from their IT investments, in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs.
The high adoption rate of SOA has attracted a large and diverse set of software vendors to compete for market share in the provision of the supporting infrastructure. As the market starts to mature, it is inevitable that vendor consolidation, which is already significant, will accelerate further.
A new Butler Group report provides a competitive analysis of 13 leading vendors of SOA infrastructure products, together with descriptions of the business issues, technology issues, and market issues that are shaping the delivery of SOA. It also gives a feature-by-feature comparison of the vendors, organized into eight categories: quality of service; messaging; standards; transformations; adapters and connectors; orchestration; business rules; and integrated development environment.
When scored on their ability to support the strategic deployment of SOA, the report highlights Oracle, Tibco and IBM as vendors that should be shortlisted.
However, different deployment scenarios emphasize different sets of capabilities. In an integration-focused deployment with simpler orchestration requirements, little call for business rules automation, but high expectations for performance and availability, Cape Clear and Progress provide strong capabilities at a lower cost than the more strategic vendors.
When the objective is to deliver automated and optimized business processes, the product sets built around a shared repository, such as Intersystems and Cordys, perform well due to the tighter integration between the environments for business analysts, developers, and administrators. Sun and JBoss feature well where the requirement is for a low-cost introduction of SOA capable of scaling to a strategic deployment.
The report identifies that the market conditions are constantly changing. Currently, a large number of vendors are all attempting to provide complete suites. As the market matures, it is inevitable that the number of competing vendors will be reduced through acquisitions, mergers, and vendors deciding unilaterally to target different markets.
At present, SOA vendors mainly target large enterprises, so the market is dominated by high-value, low-volume sales. This is expected to start to change within two or three years as the large enterprise market starts to become saturated. The need to address medium-sized enterprises will impact not just upon sales and marketing strategies, but will also have a large impact on the products themselves, with ease-of-use and reduced administration being prerequisites to mid-market success. In fact, some vendors will find it difficult to address the high-volume market.
At the same time, leading users of SOA will continue to evolve, leading to an increasing set of expectations.
Business drivers will soon stretch beyond the present expectation of greater IT responsiveness. In the future, business managers will expect to be able to define a policy, and to have that policy implemented directly by the IT infrastructure, with minimal involvement from IT staff. The automation of different types of business policies will be a major feature of the forthcoming IT landscape.
