A post on the ZDNet SOA Blog , discusses a study done by the Aberdeen group of 120 "best in class" companies/organisations who are well along in SOA. The study calculates, that these organizations "are reducing application maintenance costs as a percentage of the IT budget and increasing the percentage of allocated line-of-business innovation." The report suggests that much of these savings come with deployment of enterprise service buses to support composite applications drawing from multiple enterprise applications.

Aberdeen also found that "nine of every 10 companies are adopting or have adopted service-oriented architectures and will exit 2006 with SOA planning, design, and programming experience."

Aberdeen divided SOA implementations into three camps:

"SOA Lite" - for users deploying Web services that don't require heavy-duty enterprise functionality such as high-volume scalability or security. (A lot of Microsoft .NET and open source users here.)

"SOA ERP" - for users spinning SOAs out of their ERP packages. (Oracle, SAP.)

"Enterprise SOA" - the big, heavy-duty stuff, requiring governance and mission-critical uptime capabilities.

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Prashanth Rai