One of SOA's foundations is web services: a collection of technologies such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML, which help systems and applications communicate regardless of different technologies and platforms. Leading SOA application platform vendors include IBM, Oracle, BEA Systems, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.

"SOA and software-as-a-service (SaaS) made major impacts on the IT strategies of enterprises across the spectrum in 2006," said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, senior analyst at Springboard Research. "As Asian businesses look to become more competitive in a booming business and economic environment, they want their IT to be more innovative, agile, and adaptive to changes in business needs."

BEA cleaves to SOA

"SOA was a major shift for us in 2006," said Yip Ly, VP of strategic business development at BEA. "We began to consider SOA within our entire product family about years ago [and] did all the work necessary to refocus our products so that they are completely aligned to SOA technologies-for internal use as well."

"In Asia, we have many SOA clients at the enterprise level, including telcos," said Ly. The BEA VP said these clients invested significantly in SOA during 2006 and would continue to do so in 2007. Ly said as A-Pac countries continue to invest in their infrastructure, enterprises seek to ride the wave of e-government activity. "Countries like China and India are building huge government infrastructures and enterprises will join those networks," he said.