Springboard Research has announced results from its latest research on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market in Asia (excluding Japan). Springboard estimates the region’s 2007 SOA market amounts to $810 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%, which will bring the market to $2.2 billion by 2010.

“SOA continues to gain traction in the market as more companies are either implementing SOA or are planning to do so,” said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, senior analyst of Emerging Software for Springboard Research. “Awareness has increased substantially in the last year, and we are now seeing that translate into healthier adoption levels across Asia,” Aggarwal added.

The primary SOA drivers in Asia are improved service delivery in increasingly competitive markets and improved integration at both the data and application levels. Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are also strong drivers for SOA deployment with 49% of the firms surveyed that had experienced M&A deploying SOA to integrate the IT systems of the merged companies. Governance is also continuing to become more important with 85% of survey respondents instituting governance in SOA deployments and 40% having a structure integrated from the beginning of implementation.

“While SOA continues to do well in the region, users still have some challenges. The main challenge with SOA deployment as named by survey respondents is managing performance and scalability, and 21% mentioned this difficulty as their number one area of concern,” said Aggarwal.

From its end-user survey, Springboard found that respondents named “proven products and solutions” as the most important reason for choosing an SOA vendor, followed by “clearly defined roadmap for deployment” and “vendor reputation”.