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Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market in India is expected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 49 per cent from 2006-2009, making it the fastest growing market in the region, as per the Springboard Research report 'SOA in Asia Pacific- Towards More Business Friendly IT'.

Indian companies have one of the highest awareness levels of SOA and its benefits in the region. However, despite a much higher awareness of SOA in India, the number of companies planning to deploy SOA is less than that in China where the awareness is much lower, the report read.

A Gartner estimate states that by 2008 over 60 per cent of enterprises globally will use SOA as a guiding principle when creating mission-critical platforms. An Aberdeen group report notes 2,000 companies implementing SOA will accrue savings of over USD 53 billion by 2010.

"We believe SOA, or 'hot-pluggable solutions', will be the next big transformation as companies opt for open standards-based technology to drive and optimise their business efficiencies," said S P S Grover, vice-president (technology sales), Oracle India.

"An organisation will have many applications, such as ERP for logistics and finance, .NET for dotcoms. SOA, in a nutshell, integrates all platforms and business processes, and allows different applications to talk to each other cost-effectively," explained Timothy M Bryan, chairman and CEO of New York-based GalaxE.Solutions.

"It is not surprising that India’s pools of IT literate professionals understand the latest technologies in the market such as SOA. Often however, their efforts to implement new technologies are held back by management teams less familiar with the latest technologies or how they can benefit business results," said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, Senior Analyst at Springboard Research.

Added Dane Anderson, Vice President of Research for Springboard Research, "Although the Indian market is still in the nascent stage, large organisations in banking, manufacturing and telecommunications are beginning to plan enterprise-wide SOA deployments. A majority of the market-leading companies and those with global ambitions are more actively considering SOA than their less ambitious counterparts. The government sector is also showing keen interest in deploying SOA."

In line with other regional markets, IBM leads the SOA marketplace among Indian enterprises in terms of actual implementations, brand perception and the proportion of planners intending to partner with IBM for its SOA implementations. In terms of brand perception and preferred brands among SOA planners, Oracle, BEA and Tibco emerge as other important brands in the country, the report said.

According to the report, Indian system integrators providing offshore services and local ISVs have also been quick to include SOA in their business plans. IT service providers like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Ramco Systems, Satyam, HCL Technologies, Polaris Software, Cognizant Technologies, and Patni Computers besides a host of other small and mid size firms are building SOA capabilities.

A number of ISVs are working with SOA platform vendors to add SOA capabilities to their applications, and many are developing new applications based on SOA frameworks. Global vendors like IBM and HP have also established SOA focused facilities in India to improve their standing in the market, the report said.

HP Opens SOA Centre in Bangalore

The Bangalore centre will employ 125. According to Som Mittal, senior vice-president HP Services Technology Solutions Group, the centre will be an apex centre of HP's service offering portfolio and project delivery capabilities to enterprise customers.

Apart from the SOA centre in India, HP had unveiled two more SOA competency centres based in Cupertino, California and Singapore.

"The India centre will strengthen HP's SOA offering and will be a key component of HP's adaptive infrastructure solution portfolio. The SOA centre will leverage HP's strong infrastructure technology to deliver IT as a service, building towards an automated, 24x7, "lights-out" computing environment" said Mittal. “Mercury is an important component of HP for developing SOA applications," he added.

According to a Gartner estimate, by 2010 at least 65 per cent of large enterprise organisations will have over 35 per cent of their application portfolio SOA-based.

IBM last month set up an SOA Solutions Centre in Pune in western India, focused on developing reusable SOA services for a variety of customers. HP's Bangalore centre will focus on reusability at the design level rather than of specific code, because of potential intellectual property issues, Shrinivas Gorur, head of the centre said.