“The market for SOA infrastructure is coming to life now,” says Progress Software India Managing Director Ramesh Loganathan, who has been closely watching the industry excitement about service-oriented architecture (SOA). His company, Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS, Market Cap: $1.2 billion) which provides a comprehensive range of capabilities for the entire SOA lifecycle is moving faster to address new market opportunities. Businesses are moving from reliance on databases to reliance on software grouped around business processes—SOA. “There is a trillion dollars spent on technology every year and the largest portion of that is on integration and in this large portion most is spent on trying to make it all work,” says Loganathan.

Founded in 1981, Bedford, Massachusetts headquartered Progress Software has been constantly augmenting its SOA portfolio through several innovations and acquisitions and thereby growing its user base. The company’s 2007 revenue stood at $494 million. Company started the India development center in 2005. “Progress invests strongly in product development that exploits new advances in software technologies, anticipates market trends and provides business advantage to our partners and customers. Today, we have a strong and broad portfolio of best-in-class infrastructure products for a SOA,” says Loganathan.

The momentum behind what’s now called the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) arose from frustrations with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), although the basic idea of SOA has been around much longer. EAI, which became popular in the late 1990s, centered on creating ‘adapters’ to bridge the gaps between a central message bus and the various connected enterprise applications and data stores. The EAI promise of loose coupling (an important architectural concept that means changes in one area do not require changes elsewhere) was somewhat watered down by the complexity of code required to manage individual adaptors, and the proliferation of adapters across the IT landscape.

However, SOA takes a slightly different approach, suggesting that rather than passing data back and forth across a central integration zone through adapters, each application (or applications) should provide ‘services’ to the rest of the world. These services are made available to other applications via a similar central integration framework in a way that loosely-couples the consumer and provider of the service.

No specific software is required to deploy an SOA, it’s a design concept not a product, but certainly the software that underpins it must support the creation of services, a repository to manage them, a registry for other applications to find them, and a mechanism for service consumers and providers to exchange business information.