SOA Adoption: Budgets Don't Matter Much

IT organizations with small, medium, and large budgets are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) in large numbers; this is true whether looking at overall IT budget, overall software budget, or the percentage of software budget spent on new initiatives. Whatever way one cuts the data, at least 44% of enterprises are currently using SOA, and at least 63% will use it by the end of 2008. Still, organizational budget levels do affect the patterns of SOA adoption — sometimes in ways that are counterintuitive. For example, enterprises with medium software budgets adopt SOA ahead of those with large software budgets, but there is very little difference in SOA penetration between enterprises with large and small spending on new software initiatives. Besides the subtle differences that varying budgets create, IT managers see SOA's business value more often than IT executives do. As they pursue their role of enterprise leaders for SOA adoption, architects should understand adoption differences and arm themselves with data to set conversations about SOA on the right track.