IBM today announced the results of a survey of clients that concludes the strategic decisions to adopt a service oriented architecture (SOA) are shifting away from the realm of IT staffers to business executives. SOA is a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align it with business goals, driving efficiencies, cost savings, productivity, and enabling the creation of more modular and global business designs. The survey was conducted for IBM by the Link Group and consisted of a sampling of clients at the IBM Impact 2007 event, which drew more than 4,200 technical and business leaders. The survey validates a fundamental commitment to SOA as the future of process and application design -- with both significant increases in budgets and the number of SOA projects aimed at new business challenges. At the same time, the survey also found that there is an increasing need for training staff so they possess the unique combination of both business and IT skills required for a business to realize the potential of SOA.
