Survey: SOAs have doubled since '05

A new Web services survey finds that the percentage of functioning SOAs has almost doubled -- 24% of respondents are saying they currently have what they consider to be an SOA, compared to 13% saying so last year at this time.

The survey from Evans Data finds that more Web services are being put into production at companies. Thirty percent of respondents will be using more than 20 services in the next year, a 58% increase from today.

The survey of 400 developers and managers also found that Web services still have issues, such as security and downtime. Half of the respondents are saying that when their most reliable Web services go down, they usually stay down for an hour or more. Of the worst performing Web services, 47% are down for over six hours.

To date, most Web services and SOA deployments have been internal affairs, so downtime has not been a big deal. But there's increasing movement to externalizing SOAs, either through subscribing to outside services or publishing services available to business partners and customers. Downtime will be a matter a lot of companies will need to pay close attention to as things develop.

I wrote the final report on this survey, and also observed there has been a resurgence of the Enterprise Java Platform, despite predictions of its impending demise. The .NET Framework, while very popular, has hit a plateau in growth -- but this may change over the coming year with a potential rapid uptake of Windows Vista once its released.