SOA adoption has hit a bump in the road, according to survey detailed by Gartner on Monday.
The number of organizations planning to adopt SOA for the first time decreased to 25 per cent; it had been 53 per cent in last year’s survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 per cent in 2007 to 16 per cent in 2008. This dramatic falloff has been happening since the beginning of 2008, Gartner said.
Gartner has been doing the survey for five years, and this is the first time the numbers dropped, said analyst Dan Sholler, research vice president at Gartner. “What we’re seeing is that there are a bunch of organizations [that] for a variety of reasons don’t expect to be doing anything specific about SOA next year,” Sholler said.
This year’s survey saw a decline in the growth rate for SOA, he stressed. Overall, organizations expect to be doing fewer projects next year, with the economy contributing to that to a degree, Sholler said. Organizations also may be doing fewer things for which SOA applies, he said.
A growing number of large organizations are deferring plans to utilize SOA, the study found. Fifty-three per cent of respondents already were using SOA. Meanwhile, 20 per cent of respondents were building event-driven architectures and 20 per cent had plans to do so in the next 12 months.
Gartner also said the number of organizations already pursuing SOA shows a massive change in the future perception of SOA, from something that is essentially inevitable for all organizations in a short time to a situation where many organizations evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it.