SOA Consolidation Heats Up

According to this article in Enterprise Networks and Servers, outlining research from the Butler Group, SOA consolidation will continue. Thus, those implementing SOAs need to keep a careful eye on the consolidation as they progress their SOAs into instances of technologies.

“A new report, just published by Butler Group (https://www.butlergroup.com), Europe’s leading IT research and advisory organization, reveals the competitive nature of the market for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployment technologies. According to the report, ‘SOA Platforms’, SOA vendors need to acquire a ‘critical mass’ market share in order to sustain the ongoing development investment that will be needed, and to prosper in a market that is set to become commoditized. For enterprises the adoption of SOA provides significant potential to improve the value they derive from their IT investments, in terms of increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs.”

The issue really is that the SOA market is becoming more sophisticated, and in order to raise the value of your offering you need to own more in your portfolio. Clearly, IBM and Oracle have taking on this strategy, purchasing many SOA startups before they really have gotten traction. Moreover, we’re seeing uber deals, such as Software AG’s purchase of WebMethods. According to this report, this trend will continue if not accelerate.

So, is this good news, or bad news? Depends on who’s buying whom, if you ask me. One of the things that seem to be lacking are clear and concise product plans around these larger acquisitions, or many acquisitions. In other words, what are you really going to do with the technology you just purchased, and how will that affect the consumers of that technology? Also, what’s the meta-strategy going forward around your product offering? I often ask those questions to those buying up the SOA technology space and get blank looks, or worse, spin.

However, eventually the market for these “big honking SOA stacks” or BHSS, will run out of projects, and those with huge SOA portfolios will have to learn to sell down market.

“At the present time SOA vendors mainly target large enterprises, so the market is dominated by high value, low volume sales. Butler Group expects this will start to change within two or three years as the large enterprise market starts to become saturated. The need to address medium-sized enterprises will impact not just sales and marketing strategies, but will also have a large impact on the products themselves, with ease-of-use and reduced administration being prerequisites to mid-market success. In fact Butler Group expects some vendors will find it difficult to address the high volume market.”

I suspect that won’t be something that the larger vendors do well, and the best-of-breed players may already have taken that market by then. That is, of they are not all part of a larger player by then.