In the survey, Web Services, message brokering and Enterprise Service Bus were cited as the most useful technologies for developing, deploying and managing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), with 69% of respondents stressing the importance of a messaging infrastructure that supports multiple protocols.

The study also reveals the growing adoption of SOA across EMEA, with 60% of the respondents scheduled to deploy Service Oriented Architectures within the next six months.

"The pressures and challenges faced by European businesses mandate a much closer alignment of IT with business objectives and strategies," explains Neil Ward-Dutton of IT advisory firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton. "Central to this is a service-oriented approach which permeates all aspects of IT - but which starts with a reappraisal of application architecture."

Though close to 90% of the respondents cited Web Services as being important in the development of SOA, competing Web Services standards was seen as a primary concern in adopting SOA, followed by the perceived complexity of SOA development. However, almost half (49%) of the developers surveyed stressed that a Service Bus could help reduce development complexity and simplify integration.

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an emerging technology for integrating applications. It is the backbone that can integrate disparate applications helping to enable the free flow of information across the enterprise. Today's IT environments are comprised of multiple technologies and application platforms that cannot share information without significant software coding and integration. According to the survey, more than half (51%) of the respondents currently spend most of their integration efforts on the application layer which underlines the current struggle with integrating proprietary application stacks or software across vertical application silos.

"European businesses want to see the return on their IT investment through results such as improved efficiency, interoperability and service delivery," explains Martin Percival, senior European technology evangelist, BEA Systems. "Core to SOA success is having a simplified service infrastructure that includes an integration layer supporting dynamic interactions across services. This can be best delivered by an ESB which can help solve integration needs in a SOA-driven way by being designed to adapt to the inherent heterogeneity that exists in IT today. An ESB can also support the SOA goals of shared services re-use as well as helping to remove the task of managing service interactions from the service end points themselves."

BEA recently unveiled the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus(TM), as part of its new AquaLogic(TM) family of products, designed to help accelerate deployment of agile Service Oriented Architectures through heterogeneous, scalable Service Infrastructure. Available in later this summer, the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus will be the first product of its type to unify ESB technology and Web Services management capabilities, designed to help speed services deployment and simplify SOA management in heterogeneous environments - so IT can deliver business services faster.