The market for enterprise application integration (EAI) services will expand to $7.8bn by 2011, analysts predict, as more companies seek ways to share data between existing software applications.

The Asia-Pacific market for EAI was worth $5bn last year, according to Springboard Research, but the figures exclude the more mature Japanese market.

"Enterprise and infrastructure application integration are the two most attractive markets in Asia-Pacific's services space," said Phil Hassey, vice president for services research at Springboard.

"Both have high levels of growth and an increasingly sophisticated customer base, and clearly score higher than enterprise IT outsourcing which is being outpaced in growth terms as a market opportunity when compared to other markets. "

EAI services attempt to link existing computer systems and the diverse applications that they run.

For example, a company may have sourced its inventory control, human resources management, and customer relationship management systems from different providers, making it difficult to share data.

Asia-Pacific's entire IT services market will be worth $55.9bn by 2011, according to Springboard.

"Domination of this infrastructure services market is the target for HP following its acquisition of EDS. It will be very strongly positioned in this marketplace and will create significant discomfort across the competition," said Hassey.

"All markets are growing at varying degrees. Each year, in dollar value, the growth of the EAI services market is between 1.5 and two times the size of the total application hosting space.

"This data highlights the need to still focus on the big markets because, while in some instances the growth is not spectacular, the market size information shows the available opportunity and subsequent resources required for success."