The first is, does the organization need just service-level management and monitoring or does it need also need business-level monitoring? Second, if the organization has already made some type of platform commitment, can it get by until the platform provider's SOA management functionality catches up with what the pure-plays can offer?
While the SOA and Web services management market has received a lot of attention of late – and the number of pure-play vendors continues to dwindle as the larger platform players snatch them up – the market remains small.
"A lot of people are still waiting and there's some wisdom in that," said Randy Heffner, a vice president at Forrester and author of The Forrester Wave: SOA and Web Services Management, Q1 2006. Heffner estimated the SOA management market at about $50 million today.
