Our customers are telling us that 2007 will be a watershed year for SOA, with projects moving from departmental projects to full-scale, enterprise-level deployments. This is supported by recent research from Forrester, who found that more than 53% of organizations they surveyed had already deployed SOA. IDC estimates that spending on SOA inititvies is increasing at 75% year-over-year, and Gartner predicts that by 2008 80 percent of IT initiatives will be service-oriented. As companies make the shift to SOA, enterprise architects and project managers responsible for these initiatives will have two related concerns: maximizing adoption and reuse, while simultaneously retaining the quality, performance and governance of their SOA.

SOA is not without risk. SOA encourages the creation of multiple, reusable business services that can quickly and easily be composed together to support business processes. By its nature, SOA introduces increased complexity and interdependencies, and this demands that careful attention be paid to management, control, and service lifecycle management.