Survey: SOA Adoption Dropping

According to a survey by Gartner, the number of enterprises planning to adopt service-oriented architecture is dropping.

Gartner researchers said that although the majority of large organizations are moving ahead with SOA, a growing number are deferring plans.

Since the beginning of 2008, there has been a dramatic fall in the number of organizations that are planning to adopt SOA for the first time, according to Gartner.  In fact, it appears to be a continual decline. In 2008, the number of enterprises planning SOA adoption was cut by more than one-half, down to 25 percent from 53 percent in 2007, while the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA more than doubled from 6 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2008.

“Organizations without a clear business case for SOA and without a plan to develop or acquire the necessary skills are justified in taking a cautious approach and delaying SOA adoption plans for the coming year,” said Daniel Sholler, research vice president at Gartner. “The focus should be on creating shared services and the governance processes necessary for sharing within a reasonable domain. Larger organizations [more than 5,000 employees] are challenged to create enterprise governance.”

Moreover, the number of organizations that are already pursuing SOA shows a big change in the future perception of SOA, from something that was essentially inevitable for all organizations in a short time to a situation where many organizations have evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it, Gartner officials said.

“As more organizations gain experience with the true efforts and costs required to use SOA, and the benefits that they gain from doing it, it creates a sounder basis for making business decisions around whether to pursue it at this time,” Sholler said. “The result of this is that the later adopters have a clearer business choice, and that by taking an inherently cautious stance, it is not surprising that a higher proportion would choose not to pursue SOA.”