Services-oriented architecture (SOA) is a far greater challenge than most companies realized when they began to adopt and deploy SOA. Rework, failed projects, and immature technologies have characterized many early user enterprise SOA deployments. Moreover, users often confuse such typical project benefits as application integration with the true, longer-term benefits of SOA, such as more responsive and agile application architectures and reuse of services.

A core driver of these challenges is a lack of IT and SOA planning and governance among user business and IT management. The results for user enterprises include increased complexities and costs, and dramatically reduced SOA benefits. The results for vendors are too-often frustrated and disappointed customers.

In order to help deliver SOA success, today's software companies need to accept the reality of current SOA deployments and capitalize on the opportunity to offer appropriate products, governance and expertise.

A Study of SOA Reality
Saugatuck recently concluded an extensive research program focusing specifically on user SOA adoption - including 40 interviews with CIOs and senior IT architects. Supplementing this research were 12 "deep dive" briefings with leading software and services vendors focused on SOA.

We have published the data, analysis, and our insights in a new 30-page research report, SOA Reality Check: Three Waves of Adoption through 2012 (SSR-305, 28Dec06), now available through Saugatuck's website.

Our research clearly shows SOA experiencing slow, but steady, adoption among large and mid-sized enterprises - but that SOA is still in very early deployment cycles. The report findings on deployment include:

• Most firms deploying SOA are focused either on early-stage planning, and/or trial deployment around legacy application integration.
• Of the thirty-seven percent of executives interviewed who indicated they are currently in a limited or full production stage of SOA deployment, it should be noted that upon further discussion it became clear that many are merely managing a collection of web services, and have yet to make a strong commitment to SOA as a management discipline (as opposed to an integration technology).
• Implementers are taking a technology-led approach to SOA deployment - whereas research that Saugatuck conducted in early 2005 suggested that many early adopters were viewing SOA as needing to be a business-led initiative (see Strategic Perspective Managing the Speed Bumps on the Road to SOA, MKT-161, 31Mar05, as well as Research Alert SOA Adoption: Business Benefits Drive Strong Adoption, RA-206, 02Nov05).
• The key long-term driver of SOA adoption - cost reduction - outdistances all others by a two-to-one margin. Unlike such technology revolutions of the past as client/server and minicomputers, users are also citing "code reusability" and "business agility" as strong secondary drivers of SOA.

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