A new survey commissioned by indicates that the deployment of service oriented architectures (SOAs) is on the uptake compared to previous years, and remain a top business priority for 2008, despite the tough economy. While large companies are moving forward with their SOA strategies, there is little evidence it is trickling down to the vast majority of IT shops that are small and midsized businesses.

Results of IBM's study, which was conducted by the Link Group, indicate that 50 percent of customers are currently deploying SOAs, while another 27 percent are piloting some sort of SOA project. More than 40 percent of the respondents said SOA was their top spending priority for 2008; nearly half of the respondents are spending between 10 percent and 29 percent of their total IT budgets for 2007 on SOA projects.