The SOA readiness survey of 180 UK organisations by Birmingham-based systems integrator Griffiths Waite showed that of the 47% of respondents pursuing SOA, 20% had already implemented at least one SOA project.

And of that 20%, almost half (49%) said their main reason for adopting SOA was to achieve IT flexibility and 14% said it would enable them to get the most out of their IT investments by providing industry standards for accessing functionality and resources.

Hugh Griffiths, director of Griffiths Waite, said, "This shows UK companies are starting to put money behind SOA, which represents a definite shift away from technical discussions towards mainstream implementation."

Griffiths said another reason for the shift was an increase in the number and maturity of standards, such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for specifying business process behaviour for web services.

Read the complete article in Computer Weekly.