Unlike surveys that have sought to gauge broad market adoption of SOA by polling the IT community at large, this survey was conducted across a database of IT professionals who have an understanding for SOA concepts and methodologies. We polled a large population of Architects, Operations staff and Developers, asking them where they are in their SOA initiatives, the characteristics of their environments, what's working and what's not.

Our research indicates that SOA in the enterprise is more mature than previous studies have shown. Because nearly half of the 330 respondents have deployed SOA applications, the survey provides some interesting insights into success factors at organizations that have real-world experience with production SOA applications.