In the report titled SOA: The State of the Market, Research Director Ian Finley says SOA has emerged as “the best approach for building corporate software today. As a result, it is redefining every aspect of the software market.”

This redefining has included major enterprise application vendors such as SAP and Oracle building their own platforms to support construction of SOAs. But the report says the major IT infrastructure providers—specifically Microsoft and IBM—so far have attracted more users to their SOA platforms.

A user survey that was the basis for the report found that 59 percent of companies actively engaged in SOA projects are using the Microsoft.NET platform; 44 percent of such companies have adopted IBM’s WebSphere platform.