IBM dominates SOA market

The company was the only vendor achieving a double digit market share. Microsoft ranked second with 7 per cent. Other vendors including BEA, Tibco and Sun Microsystems' Seebeyond each logged in at 2 to 3 per cent.

Susan Eustis, president of the research firm, attributed IBM's lead to the bread of its middleware portfolio and the fact that all its products have an SOA engine baked in natively. Many competing products currently use adapters that slap on SOA functionality to their exiting middleware, Eustis told vnunet.com

The vendor at the Impact 2007 conference boasted that is has had 4500 SOA 'engagements', where one customer can count for multiple engagements. That means indicates that worldwide fewer than 9,000 companies are currently using SOAs.

Wintergreen defines a SOA engine as middleware that provides a repository or process implementation for reusable code. These engines include tools including an application server, repository, enterprise service bus (ESB), XML compression, security and messaging platform.

Companies worldwide last year spent about US$1 billion (A$1.2 billion)on SOA engines. The research firm projects that this will grow to US$3.7 billion (A$4.5 billion) by 2013, amounting to 20 per cent annual growth. Overall adoption of SOAs however will far outgrow sales, as Wintergreen predicts prices of SOA components to fall from their current peak of US$7,200 (A$8,700) by up to 99 per cent to US$100 (A$121).

But SOA middleware won't be the big growth opportunity for SOA vendors. She projects that selling online service will fall by 2013, as companies will find out that externally developed code offers better performance and reliability than their internal creations.