Corporate investments in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance are expected to rise sharply across the Asia-Pacific region, particularly among organizations with one or more SOA project deployments, according to the latest report from Springboard Research, an innovator in the IT market research industry.

As per Springboard's report "SOA Governance in Asia Pacific", awareness of the importance of SOA governance is increasing sharply across Asia-Pacific, as most companies in the region that have implemented SOA have also instituted governance mechanisms at some point during the SOA project."

"We believe that without investments in SOA governance, 60%-90% of SOA-related projects will fail to deliver a positive return on investment," said Michael Barnes, Vice- President for Software Research at Springboard Research. "It is not possible to benefit from SOA as an approach unless you can effectively leverage and manage SOA artifacts; not just services themselves, but also SOA-related policies, processes and metadata," Barnes added.

The report also showed that early adopters in the region have learned from SOA deployments in advanced IT markets, and have made SOA governance an imperative from the beginning of SOA project planning. While savvy implementers have a formalized structure for SOA governance, the research also finds that there are many organizations in the region with loosely comprised groups to supervise architectural issues and broadly define policies.

According to a survey of 354 CIOs and IT managers across the region, 40% of SOA implementers had incorporated governance mechanisms from the beginning of their SOA projects.

According to Springboard's report, the rising demand for SOA governance technologies, products and approaches has forced IT vendors to increase governance-related investments and improve governance support within their SOA product portfolios. At the same time, IT vendors focused specifically on SOA governance will likely either be acquired by larger, existing SOA product or services solution providers or will survive only in niche markets where they have a defensible differentiation.

Despite inevitable consolidation and convergence however, Springboard expects most organizations to continue choosing best-of-breed (or at least task-specific) SOA governance technologies and solutions over the next 2-3 years.

The SOA governance market remains highly fragmented, with a dynamic mix of software infrastructure and middleware vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Software AG), management vendors (HP) and specialists (Amberpoint, SOA Software) all seeking to flesh out their capabilities while vying to create strong market leadership positions.