Service-oriented architecture benefits big players

Earnings from service-oriented architecture (SOA) may reach nearly US$43 billion by 2010 as companies move from piecemeal web services -- but larger channel partners stand to gain most.

A report released last week by US research firm ZapThink has claimed that the market formed as such individual markets coalesce will be worth nearly US$4.4 billion by 2005, and nearly US$43 billion by 2010.

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, cited application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration and business process management as six key markets that will become transformed as vendors adopt SOA.

'Today's IT executives want the efficiency of working with a small number of vendors for SOA solutions, while at the same time they require the flexibility of being able to select best-of-breed solutions,' he said.

The new market category would offer solutions delivered by individual products, product suites or service offerings, the report said.

Bloomberg added that the big winners from the shift to service orientation would be large channel partners such as BEA Systems and Tibco Software. Such companies use ideas and technologies developed by smaller players to build SOA frameworks on a larger scale.

However,  ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer said smaller channel partners and new entrants into the marketplace could build value-adds to these products and build packages to fill in the gaps between those from larger firms.

'There is a huge opportunity for channel partners in this space,' said Schmelzer. 'As the market grows, there will be a need to build out applications, and the channel will become a critical part of that.'

Schmelzer and Bloomberg said SOA should be considered a way to build application functionality. As an SOA industry grows, web services and XML appliance markets known today could fade away, they said.