If you haven't heard of the SOA Leaders Council, it's something you should check out. It's a collaborative peer-to-peer community of corporate and government SOA users who share their experiences and expertise with real-world SOA implementations. There's not a single vendor in sight. Instead, actual users talk about actual projects--both successes and challenges.There's a round of regional SOA Leaders Council meetings come up in late October and November that will feature presentations by leading corporate adopters of SOA and analysts from Forrester Research. The discussion topic will be "Architecture in Action," and the meetings will be held at the following locations on the following dates:

San Francisco: October 26 New York: October 27 Atlanta: October 28 Toronto: November 9 Minneapolis: November 10 London: November 16

A poll conducted at the last round of regional chapter meetings indicated the rapid growth of corporate adoptions of SOA applications. It also detailed the challenges. Chief among them: still-evolving industry standards and the challenges of reusing software components.

In other survey results, 72 percent of respondents reported that they currently have SOA applications in production. Another 22 percent expect to have SOA applications in production by the middle of 2006. Organizations with production SOA applications had, on average, 25 staff members working on the initiative, and had built 41 services by the time the survey was conducted.

This bolsters the anecdotal evidence that SOA adoption is increasing, albeit cautiously. According to the poll, the most commonly reported means for proving the value of SOA were "opportunistic projects" and demonstrating how SOAs enable IT to better align with business goals.

If you're interested, check out one of the regional meetings of the SOA Leaders Council. Or contact them at www.soaleaders.org.