(June 16, 2003) - In a survey recently commissioned by Actional Corporation, 93 percent of IT professionals at Fortune 2000 companies cite deploying Web services as a key IT initiative. The survey also found that more than 60 percent of all respondents plan to deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA), using Web services, in the near future, with more than half of them expecting to deploy immediately or within the next 12 months. The primary driver, concluded from the survey, is the desire to achieve greater agility and flexibility in meeting business demands.

SOAs provide organizations with a cost-effective and flexible strategy for building and deploying an IT architecture that can seamlessly connect to services in near real-time both inside and outside the organization. SOAs enable businesses to rapidly respond to changing market demands and deliver increased flexibility in creating various internal and external business networks among distributed employees, partners, and customers. Fueling the adoption of SOAs is the growing acceptance of Web services standards. With the underpinnings of Web services solidly in place, the survey findings suggest that IT departments have embraced the benefits of Web services and are using them to take their SOAs to the next level.

While the deployment of SOAs through Web services accelerates the ability for organizations to respond to change, Web services environments are highly interdependent and complex. Any small change to the service network, such as the addition of a new supply-chain partner or conversion to a new CRM application, can create a ripple effect of change across the entire service network, leading to service network downtime and service failure. Deploying a comprehensive Web services management solution as part of an organization's SOA and Web services initiative can help companies reduce the negative impact of change inherent in Web services environments. This approach allows organizations to understand key network interdependencies and proactively identify and resolve service network problems - ensuring network uptime and significantly increasing the benefits of their SOA and Web services deployments.

With Actional's active Web services broker, SOAPstation, companies can begin to realize ROI at the project level. Actional also helps companies continue to manage their maturing SOA with Web services management products that monitor and control the entire enterprise Web service network.

The survey, commissioned by Actional, was conducted by the Palo Alto Research Group, where 429 IT Professional's at Fortune 2000 companies were polled in May 2003.