Companies adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) spent $1.4 million on software and services in 2007, according to a report released by AMR Research.

“The SOA Spending Report 2007-2008,” which surveyed IT executives from the United States, Germany, and China, found that the primary drivers for SOA investment were to meet the need to change investments faster, cheaper, and with less risk (22%), to meet requirements of individual projects (18%), and to reduce IT costs through reuse (17%).

Survey respondents represented a cross-section of companies with 500-10,000+ employees in the process and discrete manufacturing, retail, wholesale/distribution, telecom, and financial services industries.  According to the survey, SOA adoption and spending largely varied across vertical industry, location, and size of company.

“SOA adoption and interest varied by industry in some surprising ways,” said Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research.  “Financial services, the top revenue vertical reported in vendor interviews, came in at the bottom in our SOA adoption tally. Upon further analysis, we discovered that while a smaller percentage of financial services companies have adopted SOA, those adopters are spending a great deal more on SOA than their peers in other industries. In other sectors, more of the industry has adopted SOA, but the average company spends a more modest amount.”

Additional highlights of this report include:

• SOA adoption is broad based and growing rapidly—China, Germany, and the United States all showed adoption growth rates of over 100%.
• SOA spending is significant—45% of SOA adopters reported spending over $500K on SOA software and services in 2007.