SOA still a white space?

MUMBAI, INDIA: The service-oriented architecture (SOA) market in India is at a nascent stage, and the market remains largely untapped by major vendors although many opportunities exist. Many corporations are still evaluating and analyzing the concept and its effectiveness. The current adoption rate is slow as SOA is considered as more of a technology need rather than a business focus. At present, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.8 by 2015.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan Service-Oriented Architecture Market in India, finds that market earned revenues of over $128.1 million in 2008 and estimates this to reach $604.8 million in 2015.

"SOA is expected to gain good market penetration and momentum because of various factors, for instance, it offers increased business agility, improved governance and policy management framework," says Girish Trivedi, Deputy Director, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, South Asia & Middle East. "SOA can prove to be an effective long-term investment for businesses as it facilitates outsourcing of applications or business processes."

The benefits of the technology include ease of interoperability, reusability, and the ability to handle organizational growth objectives. Besides, it helps lower incremental development, maintenance, and integration costs. SOA allows the enterprise to quickly transform its infrastructure in response to changes in the business environment and helps in the management of commonly re-usable business services. With the industry witnessing a number of mergers and acquisitions, SOA can facilitate integration of IT and business processes across the merged or acquired entities.

SOA based deployments are witnessing a slow growth phase as currently enterprises do not consider it a 'must have' to meet organizational goals. Another major impediment for SOA rollout is its extended time frame. Generally, it takes three to four years for full deployment. Besides the long development cycle, mapping of current architecture to the SOA framework, minimal expertise in defining business services to be mapped to the SOA model, and management complexity in handling an integrated IT framework are some factors restraining the uptake of SOA. The implementation of SOA entails changes organizational functioning thereby facing resistance for adoption from within the organization.

"Initial investment is very high and always not affordable by the major segments in India such as the small and medium business (SMB) segments," says Trivedi. "Some of the organizations lack expertise in defining business services, as a result of which, migration to SOA becomes difficult."

However, with the rapidly changing business and technology scenarios, it becomes crucial for organizations to rapidly adapt to changes by remaining agile and thereby competitive in the marketplace. SOA enables organizations to achieve this agility.

The SOA market in India consists of various participants that serve a wide range of customers. In order to cater to the needs of this particular market, many organizations have established development centers specifically meant for developing and supporting SOA offerings.

Going forward, SOA technology will be subject to standardization and integration of different applications in the future. Due to standardization and interoperability of SOA technology, commercial software packages will become more accessible to customers. SOA vendors are targeting large organizations due to the high growth opportunities that exist in that arena. Trends indicate that demand springs not from packaged applications alone but also from custom development.