Investors looking for double digit growth in SOA vendors are likely to be disappointed.

Implications: SOA is not a revolutionary market.  The key SOA concepts have been around for more than 20 years and tools that implements these concepts have been in the marketplace for more than 10 years.  This is an evolutionary market that will benefit system integration companies and not the product vendors.

Analysis: SOA is not a revolutionary market. The key SOA concepts have been around for more than 20 years and tools that implement these concepts have been in the marketplace for more than 10 years.  SOA is an evolution of component-based architecture that has its roots in CORBA and J2EE. 

A major focus of SOA is to split monolithic applications into manageable chunks that can be stitched together in new ways using business process platforms to create new applications.  There is solid merit to this argument but it is not new.  There were many vendors in the mid-90s who provided successful business process platforms to implement this capability, namely Vitria, Tibco, CrossWorld, SeeBeyond and WebMethods. 

I would say SOA is an evolutionary market.  The key evolution in IT infrastructure that has happened since the 90s, is a stable internet, robuts HTTP(s) protocol, open metadata and business process description standards.  However, If a company has already written an application using CORBA or J2EE, they are largely SOA compliant and there is little coding needed to be compliant with the new protocols.  The real benefit of moving to SOA will be derived by applications that are not components based.

Corporations today have a broad IT portfolio that allows them to be SOA compliant.  There is no need to buy a new product to become SOA compliant.  The SOA market is an opportunity for system integration vendors and not for the product vendors.  This is one reason why the SOA license growth has been largely stagnant over the past year for vendors such IBM, Oracle, BEA, Tibco, SAP, Microsoft and Sun.  Investors looking for double digit growth in these vendors due to the SOA market opportunity are likely to be disappointed.