Mega-vendors IBM, Oracle and SAP -- among others -- are spending billions to promote Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the way forward for businesses struggling to create more flexible, agile business processes while reducing the cost of application development and management. Given all the "noise" in the market about SOA, we determined that it was time to find out what users are really doing with SOA -- hence we set out to interview over forty senior IT executives to find out what they are -- and are not -- doing with SOA. Hence the title of this report -- a "SOA Reality Check."When we embarked on our research program in the summer of 2006, our goal was to conduct a real-world analysis and assessment of SOA adoption. This includes understanding the types of applications where SOA is being applied, the degrees of enterprise compared to point solution deployment, whether SOA adoption is being led by business or by IT leadership, and the depth of enterprise SOA penetration.
