As I've commented before, setting unreasonable expectations is one of the biggest risks for service-oriented architecture (or BPM or...), and some people are already looking at “service-oriented” as a dirty word.
From a recent LooselyCoupled blog entry:
The first signs that the initial peak of hype is approaching comes when analysts begin predicting massive market growth. So ZapThink's latest prediction, released as news just before Christmas, that the service oriented architecture market will reach “$43 billion by 2010”, is a sure sign that the current passion for SOA is about to turn sour.
Phil Wainewright is dead-on about semantic integration, repository/discovery, service assembly, and skills/practices as the missing pieces, and these are challenges that are neither new nor unique to service-oriented architecture.
Is the $43B number reasonable? I haven't read the ZapThink report, but if you believe a $150B total size for the 2004 enterprise software marketplace (databases, application servers, ERP/MRP, ...) and assume an aggressive 7% annual rate of growth over the next seven years, that puts 2010's enterprise software market at around $225B. The $43B would be 19%.
That 7% number may be overly aggressive. Versus 2002, the 2003 revenues of the Software Magazine Software500 (registration required) actually slipped 4% from $301.8B to $289.7B. The Software500 numbers include services as well, so while the number is not a pure measurement of the enterprise software licensing marketplace, it is a very accurate measurement of the overall marketplace for software and services. It might not be unreasonable to assume that the Software500 represents a roughly stable market at around $300B, in which case the $43B would represent 14.3% of the total market.
I am willing to believe that SOA will find its way into 14-19% of the software market, but I don't think it will represent a distinguishable segment of the future market any more than any technique or approach (e.g., XML or object-oriented programming) represents a distinguishable segment of the current market.
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