*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in ebizQ’s SOA Supplement in InfoWorld. This topic and related ones will be discussed at ebizQ's virtual SOA in Action Conference. Sign up here!

Current State of the SOA Market

If you’ve been reading the industry press lately and worrying that your company is lagging dangerously behind the SOA bandwagon, you’ll be interested to hear that the hype is far ahead of actual implementations. A recent ebizQ SOA Governance survey of over 300 IT practitioners representing 21 different industries revealed that most companies were still in the early stages of SOA adoption (Chart 1). Fewer than 30% had deployed solutions in production. The rest were in the exploration, planning and pilot states of SOA adoption. While everyone seems to be talking about the benefits of SOA, actually implementing an SOA infrastructure is proving to be extremely challenging. Since this is not shrink-wrapped software, there are many different types of business initiatives that can drive SOA implementation, and there are a myriad of technologies and systems involved. Companies seem to be moving cautiously, and this is probably a good way to mitigate the risks.

Given the state of market adoption, it is not surprising that only 19% have more than 50 services in production (Chart 2). Almost half the respondents (49.5%) have fewer than ten services deployed. The industries that have the most services deployed include financial services and banking, insurance, technology and telecommunications. Because these industries were also the early adopters of integration technology, this is probably not merely a coincidental finding. Early adopters of integration technology would naturally gravitate to the standards-based interfaces defined by Web services as preferable to proprietary application adapters. Furthermore, SOA is inherently a distributed architecture, so those who have done the work of integrating their systems are in a better position to move to the next stage of taking an SOA approach to integrating and reusing existing corporate assets.