Europe leads with SOA: if so, why?

John Michelsen of iTKO asked an interesting question in his most recent post: "Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America?"

Is Europe better with architecture?

This first thought that comes to mind is whether there is hard data that shows that Europe, indeed, is ahead in SOA. Just today, IDC posted a press release that talked about Europe's growing interest in SOA. The leading sector is banking, in which about 25% have SOA in production, along with 48% with SOA underway or being planned.

But good comparative data between the two continents is hard to come by. Without hard data to compare North American and European adoption rates, all we have is anecdotal evidence.

John speculates that part of the reason European adoption seems higher is that it SOA is often driven by developers working in smaller teams. "Service-orientation can be started on a much smaller scale, and tested pragmatically before rollout to the larger organization. So, SOA there doesn't need to be an enterprise-level initiative in all cases, it can be something the company dabbles in before making a full commitment."

Still, others say there is a greater emphasis on enterprise architecture within European companies, and that's the reason SOA seems stronger there.

ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer observes that there is widespread belief (which he mainly disagrees with) that "enterprise architecture as a practice is more widely respected and practiced in Europe than it is in the US. Some believe that the IT community in the US is perceived as developer-centric, coding cowboys that care not a whit about architecture."

Still, he observes that "most large European-based IT shops see enterprise architecture as a way to guarantee that projects don’t go off into the weeds with developers doing their thing without a central coordinating philosophy and organization. In essence, they see a distinct difference between architecture and development, and the roles of architects and developers, whereas that precise topic seems to be an item for debate in the US."

Again, I am not aware of hard evidence or data that Europe is ahead or even with North America in terms of SOA. Perhaps Europe has a keener sense of reuse and sharing baked into its culture, and this spills over into its management approaches. But, make no mistake about it, SOA is clearly a global phenomenon -- in fact, Asia is probably seeing the fastest SOA adoption rates of all.