"We found high incidence of IT best practices like standardising IT infrastructure and middleware technology, deploying web services and a strong awareness of products and technologies critical to SOA deployment, which augurs well for increased SOA adoption in the coming years," said Balaka Baruah Aggarwal, senior market analyst--emerging software at Springboard Research.

These findings are from a Springboard survey of 343 CIOs and business managers of SMBs and large enterprises in ASEAN (Singapore, Malayasia, Philippines), Australia, India, China and New Zealand.

The survey also revealed that the overall pace of SOA adoption has slowed as it has become more mainstream, with many planners yet to deploy SOA and a majority of SOA implementers expecting to increase their investments in SOA in 2009.

"The adoption cycle for SOA in APAC is going through the natural maturation process typical of most IT-related markets," said Michael Barnes, vice president of software research at Springboard Research.

"We find that SOA initiatives here are less a specific objective or design point and more of an approach that has quickly become an integral part of other IT projects, such as new application development, business process management, and application and data integration," Barnes added.

The survey revealed that the biggest primary reasons for SOA adoption by APAC enterprises are for application integration (18 per cent), data integration (12 per cent) and reducing the time and cost of delivering new services (9 per cent). Further, 72 per cent of overall respondents have deployed web services (and adopted web services standards), helping to ensure a steady, ongoing demand for SOA-related initiatives that leverage those standards.