SOA key to Web 2.0

The majority of organisations perceive service oriented architecture (SOA) as a key enabler to the effective use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

A survey of 330 respondents in 11 European countries conducted Vanson Bourne reveals that 55 per cent of organisations view SOA at the best way to support the use of social networking and Web 2.0 development techniques in their IT infrastructure.

The European Business Innovation Survey sponsored by software vendor BEA also found that web services is the most popular web technology that organisations will use in the next 12 months as part of their Web 2.0 strategy (cited by 57 per cent of respondents). Collaboration technologies were next most popular for 32 per cent, followed by blogs (27 per cent).

BEA said web 2.0-based software, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and mashups, are being adapted for business use with the potential to deliver productivity gains for knowledge workers in areas including marketing, sales, communications, research and development and human resources.

It also suggests these knowledge workers can collaboratively create business applications that combine ad hoc content, consume external internet services, and access service-enabled enterprise data to help complete their business tasks.

"SOA is about helping to increase business competitive advantage by enabling IT to deliver value faster through a more agile infrastructure. Enterprise social computing is about empowering end-users to become more productive and agile in carrying out daily activities," said Martin Percival, BEA senior technology evangelist for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

He said that by using these tools integrated with a SOA, enterprise can enable their workers to tap into many of the service-enabled enterprise data sources and processes for their information-intensive work requirements.

But interest in and demand for such technologies varies from country to country. The strongest demand for web services is in Scandinavia: 90 per cent in Finland, 83 per cent in Norway, and 60 per cent in Denmark, compared to the European average of 57 per cent.

The UK leads the way, along with France, in its demand for collaboration (57 per cent); where they are least in demand in Denmark (seven per cent). And 77 per cent of both Swedish and UK organisations intend to use blogs as part of their Web 2.0 strategies in the next 12 months, compared with the European average of 27 per cent.

The countries participating in the survey were Benelux, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK and respondents came from finance, logistics and transportation, pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications and utilities and energy industrial sectors.

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