Spotted this on ZDNet today -

Is the SOA glass one-tenth full, or nine-tenths empty?

A new survey finds that more than one out of ten federal agencies, 11%, now have a functioning service-oriented architecture up and running within their organizations. Is one out of ten a lot, considering we're just getting our feet wet with all this SOA stuff? Or is it miniscule, considering it means that 89% don't have an SOA in place yet?

A vendor body called the "The Merlin Federal SOA Coalition" interviewed 196 federal IT decision makers and finds a mixed picture to date in SOA implementations.

For now, one out of ten is a good start for an approach and generation of technologies the industry is just starting to get its arms around. While implementations are in the minority, it seems every agency now has some level of interest in SOA: Along with the 11% that already have SOA, 38% report they are in the planning stages, 15% in design, 18% in pilot, and 18% are in some stage of deploying SOA.  That's 100%.

I'd be really interested to see how the private sector stacks up. With all the talk around Services Oriented Architecture, and the acknowledged critical role it will play in unified communications, it would make for some interesting conversation. The article did have the following info -

However, paralleling InformationWeek's recent general industry survey, the feds aren't getting much more out of their implementations than anyone else at this point.
The survey finds only 22% of those with completed projects (presumably, out of that 11%) claiming their SOA implementations to be successful, defined as meeting the project's identified goals. (Only seven percent in the IW survey considered their SOA projects to be successes, so it's an improvement.) Twenty-eight percent of the federal agencies claimed the project was either "not successful" (14%) or a "fiasco" (14%).

I'm off to do a little digging on the penetration rate and success of SOA



Technorati Tags: SOA, Services Oriented Architecture, unified communicatoins