Another perspective on SOA focuses on compliance. "In Hong Kong lately, a greater frequency of IPOs, mergers and acquisitions have made compliance a huge issue," said Louie. "These factors get people thinking that, in a merger for example, we'd better be able to streamline processes to more easily integrate or outsource. In terms of compliance, we need to be able to make our process visible or auditable where necessary-this is when Oracle can suggest SOA."

The financial services sector and telecoms service sector are growing fastest according to BEA's Ly, particularly in Asia. He sees the usage of SOA going beyond the traditional web browser in 2007. "There will be a lot of energy put into mobile devices and PDAs as well," he said. "This will drive the success of SOA even more as there will be more consumers addressed."

"What we have seen in 2006 in regard to spending were pilot projects, not core business processes," said Ly. "As users evolve their core processes using technologies like SOA, we see a spending trend. They are going to be spending more in 2007 at the business core-those purchases means decisions will be taken at a higher level, above the CIO level, and the schemes will have to go to board rooms to be approved."

For 2007, Oracle's Louie sees projects that involve core systems, like centralized banking, centralized telco customer-base systems or subscriber systems. "These demand a lot of well thought-out infrastructure design," he said. "We will see more detailed, longer planning cycles with more careful thought on how to structure the whole solution-this is a governance issue, as many in the industry is pushing standards and coming out with solutions in the web 2.0 arena."

"When I look at business trends in IT over 2006 I note there was no special focus on a particular technology area," said Paul Li, director of marketing, Sun Microsystems, greater China. "Rather, the trend is towards making things more transparent-the authorities are making sure that enterprises are doing the right thing [regarding] compliance. SOA makes companies want to have a sound IT infrastructure in order to comply with those rules. Also, the network growth at customer locations makes businesses consider deployment of web services and architectures that can handle diverse locations, time zones and to some extent, a customer's individual behavior."