There have been widespread reports that implementation of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is slower than expected. A new survey of adoption patterns for SOAs and Web services by webMethods appears to back this up, showing that although more than 80 percent of respondents from 500 companies currently deploy Web services, SOA adoption is still "formative."

According to the survey, there are two main things standing in the way of SOA adoption--and concern about the technology itself isn't one of them. Instead, the lack of widely accepted methodologies and related business case analysis tools were cited as the chief roadblocks to SOA.

Nevertheless, there was much positive to take away from the study. Rick Clements, director of strategic marketing at webMethods, said there were three things to highlight: the first, he said, is that "SOA is real, people are actually implementing it." Secondly, SOA is much more than just Web services management--SOA implementations encompass business process management (BPM), portals, registries, and cultural and governance issues. Finally, "we actually have customers who are realizing ROI from SOAs, customers who are actually deploying these technologies and getting a return on their investments," he said.

In addition to the majority of respondents deploying Web services already, more than half were already conducting more than 10,000 Web services transaction per month, with 6 percent handling more than 1 million Web services transactions per month.

Among the top three reasons that users gave as their primary purposes for pursuing an SOA strategy were: ability to reuse services in the future (20.4 percent); ability to lower integration costs (17.6 percent); and the ability to enable faster delivery of projects (16.2 percent).

In terms of what is inhibiting SOA deployment, 17 percent it was a lack of general knowledge of SOA within their enterprise; 15 percent said it was the difficulty quantifying the ROI around SOA; and finally, 12 percent said it was governing development standards within the enterprise.