SOA Platforms: Global Trends to 2013 (Strategic Focus)

Content

• Overview
  • Catalyst
  • Summary
  • Key Messages
  • SOA is an IT architecture pattern as well as a business strategy and set of technologies
  • Strategic and tactical responses to the business dynamics are driving the demand for SOA
  • SOA market penetration is hard to gauge, but the opportunity is considerable
  • Although technology stack is well defined, rival implementation approaches have emerged
  • Scale matters in the SOA competitive landscape, but a clear strategy is more important
  • Success in the SOA market depends on an optimal go-to-market strategy
  • Table of figures
  • Table of tables
  • Market Opportunity
  • SOA has emerged as the technology pattern for the networked organization
  • Reports of the death of SOA are greatly exaggerated
  • The higher the disruptive potential of a technology, the sterner the critique
  • The tripartite nature of SOA resists unambiguous definitions
  • SOA definitions are legion, but the emphasis is on SOA as a design pattern
  • The evolution of SOA has resulted in the proliferation of definitions
  • SOA trinity: SOA is an IT architecture pattern as well as a business strategy and set of technologies
  • SOA is a form of application virtualization that exposes functionality as technology-independent services
  • SOA is a concept, not a product, but an SOA technology stack has formed
  • SOA abstracts both technology and business logic
  • SOA is fractal
  • BPM and BAM are highly complementary to the core SOA platform
  • A core SOA platform deals with run-time execution
  • Management and monitoring modules are set to become an even more important part of the SOA platform
  • SOA platforms or ESBs?
  • SOA is driven by a combination of strategic and tactical responses to a changing world
  • Changes in application development and delivery strategies are driving SOA
  • The revival of the mainframe era through cloud service architecture is only possible with SOA
  • SOA facilitates the acquisition principle of 'compose' applications
  • IT/business alignment is the strategic link between the two domains
  • Tactical issues remain a potent driving force behind SOA initiatives
  • Application integration is easier with SOA
  • Silo busting with SOA
  • SOA rationalizes the infrastructure
  • Agility, service-orientation and process innovation are the key strategic business drivers
  • A networked economy demands agility and systems built for change
  • The switch to services is transforming the organizational structure
  • Process orientation is enabled by SOA silo busting
  • Strategic business issues open several tactical fronts in which SOA can prove its value
  • Despite compelling arguments for SOA, many potent inhibitors remain
  • SOA could be hard to justify
  • SOA could be hard to adopt
  • SOA is vulnerable to many standard pitfalls of strategic IT projects
  • Customer Impact
  • The impact of SOA is hard to gauge, but the potential market opportunity is considerable
  • Middleware is currently the least adopted mainstream enterprise technology
  • SOA adoption is difficult to gauge, but the technology is far from ubiquitous
  • Fewer than one in five enterprises have deployed SOA but adoption rates will increase
  • The SOA market can be clearly segmented by enterprise size band
  • Over one third of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees are set to adopt SOA by 2010
  • The larger the enterprise, the larger the legacy real estate
  • The SOA journey demands continuous investment
  • Datamonitor predicts that the market for SOA software will exceed $4 billion by year-end 2013
  • The SOA technology market will grow rapidly, with expansion gathering pace after 2011
  • Early adopters are seeded throughout the industries, but SOA spending remains concentrated
  • Technology Evolution
  • Layers in the SOA technology stack are increasingly well defined
  • The bottom of the stack deals with service enablement and definition
  • The service repository and the federated service bus form the core of SOA infrastructure
  • The service bus layer is logical and implementation needs to be flexible and federated
  • Service orchestration and process composition layers are converging
  • Rival approaches to the implementation standards are emerging
  • The SOA platform stack became synonymous with Web Services standards
  • WS standards form the basis of SOA platform technologies
  • The WS-* stack is widely adopted but doubts regarding implementation are increasing
  • WS standards are verbose, inflexible and overly specified
  • WS standards rarely excel at what the name implies
  • RESTful protocols are emerging as lightweight alternative to WS-*
  • REST is the Internet reverse-engineered
  • REST architecture uses ubiquitous W3C standards instead of WS-* protocols
  • WOA can be built on REST and other Internet-based protocols
  • WS-* or REST? SOA or WOA?
  • SOA technology vendors will support both approaches to service-orientation
  • Competitive Landscape
  • The competitive landscape is shaped by the maturation of SOA platform technologies
  • Enterprise application vendors aim to provide next-generation application platforms through SOA
  • Application platform conglomerates see SOA as the way to derive value from application suites
  • Application and middleware conglomerates intend to provide support both for business and technology
  • Middleware conglomerates are caught between top-down and bottom-up approaches to SOA
  • The Big Three middleware vendors are taking up the challenges of strategically-driven SOA
  • Middleware conglomerates that focus exclusively on composite application development may struggle
  • SOA specialists have an opportunity to capitalize on commoditization and ride the trend of lightweight SOA
  • Success in the SOA market can come from either a top-down or bottom-up approach
  • Application conglomerates and the middleware Big Three compete for strategic deployments
  • Bottom-up adoption strategy will broaden the appeal of SOA
  • Go to Market
  • The future of SOA depends on the optimal go-to-market strategy
  • Datamonitor predicts significant IT budget retrenchment in 2009
  • Enterprise priorities are changing fast as they seek to cope with economic turbulence
  • Vendors should positioning SOA as a pragmatic 'make do and mend' technology
  • Strategic agility never goes out of fashion, but 2009 may not be the year of high-risk strategies
  • SOA vendors should adopt long-term account strategies and drive an incremental SOA approach
  • Consider open-source and hybrid proprietary/open-source portfolios
  • Deploy just enough complexity to cater for the initial project and expand the portfolio incrementally
  • Measure the impact of SOA and weave compelling narratives to justify further investments
  • Use vertical expertise to address current business pain-points specific to individual industries
  • Tough economic times call for bold marketing strategies
• APPENDIX
  • Definitions
  • Methodology
  • Further reading
  • Ask the analyst
  • Datamonitor consulting
  • Disclaimer
• List of Tables
  • Table 1: Current adoption and the predicted maximum adoption of SOA by enterprise size band
  • Table 2: What proportion of your applications would you consider to be legacy applications?
  • Table 3: Planned SOA investment by enterprise size-band
  • Table 4: How do you expect your IT budget to change in '09 compared to '08?
  • Table 5: What are your major strategic goals for this year (Rate 1 to 4, 1=not influential; 4=highly influential)
• List of Figures
  • Figure 1: Businesses are evolving from the industrial to the networked era
  • Figure 2: SOA can be defined as a trinity of IT architecture, business strategy and technology
  • Figure 3: Core SOA reference architecture
  • Figure 4: Service composites can appear as monolithic units or higher-order services
  • Figure 5: The SOA stack and immediately adjacent technologies
  • Figure 6: SOA is driven by strategic and tactical aims in the business and IT domain
  • Figure 7: In the first quarter of the 21st century enterprises will compose, not buy or build, applications
  • Figure 8: Aligning IT with business goals is a growing concern for CIOs
  • Figure 9: Over half of enterprises are overwhelmed by application maintenance workload
  • Figure 10: Middleware technologies, including SOA, achieve the lowest rate of adoption
  • Figure 11: Fewer than one in five enterprises have adopted SOA, but penetration is set to increase
  • Figure 12: SOA, BPM and enterprise portals are deployed primarily within large organizations
  • Figure 13: Enterprises with over 5,000 employees are twice as likely to adopt SOA than smaller organizations
  • Figure 14: The proportion of legacy applications increases with enterprise size, pushing SOA adoption further
  • Figure 15: Most enterprises are making continuous investments in SOA
  • Figure 16: Software licensing revenues associated with SOA technologies are set to triple by 2013
  • Figure 17: Telecommunications and financial services will remain the principal focuses of spending
  • Figure 18: The SOA stack can be decomposed in six functional layers
  • Figure 19: Datamonitor segments SOA platform vendors into three categories and five sub-categories
  • Figure 20: SOA Platforms Decision Matrix: technology assessment and market impact scores only
  • Figure 21: Combined Datamonitor BPM/SOA Decision Matrix - integration assessment included
  • Figure 22: Combined Datamonitor BPM/SOA Decision Matrix - integration assessment as of Q4 '08 included
  • Figure 23: Enterprises are cutting back on their IT budgets in H2 2008
  • Figure 24: IT departments are focusing on the core tasks of running efficient IT infrastructures
  • Figure 25: Enterprises most likely to invest in SOA prefer direct vendor relationships and systems integrators