SOA Adoption: Many Firms Got Started In 2007

The IT industry is continuing its strong adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA), according to Forrester's latest survey data. A year ago, our data highlighted a general slowness in moving from SOA planning to actual use of SOA. This slowness disappeared in 2007's data, with strong growth in current use of SOA across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions. But is SOA delivering on its promises? Apparently so: Just like in 2005 and 2006, a strong majority of current SOA users plan to do more SOA. Not only this, but more and more SOA users are seeing its role for enabling strategic business transformation. Flexibility and cost savings are both important drivers for SOA, but our data leans toward flexibility as the more important driver. For enterprise architects, this data points to the way of success for an SOA strategy: The most critical aspects of SOA are business-oriented, and SOA technology is merely a foundation for business-oriented restructuring of IT's processes and deliverables.