IT directors’ interest in service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is set to grow and is likely to have a major impact on firms’ application purchasing decisions.

That is the view of senior executives at SOA tool providers IBM and BEA, who last week insisted the concept of standards-based architecture to let firms combine and reuse application components is gaining support as more companies roll out pilot projects.

Bruce Graham, vice-president at BEA, said a recent global survey of 500 IT and business professionals by analyst IDG Research showed SOA adoption had started to take off in the past year. The proportion of respondents designating SOA as a high or critical priority for the next three to five years was 79 percent, up from 61 percent in the previous year’s study.

“SOAs are still at the pilot stage in a lot of organisations, but there is a gradual evolution underway towards this new way of building applications,” Graham added.

This view was echoed by Mike Borman, vice-president of worldwide sales at IBM’s software group, who said the company was on track to undertake 1,000 SOA Project Definition Workshops with individual customers by the end of the year.

Advocates of SOA strategies say the capability to create new applications from loosely-integrated components reduces IT costs by shortening application development time. It could also deliver greater flexibility by making applications better able to support changing business processes.

The deployment of SOAs is also affecting firms’ application development decisions, Borman said. “Whenever a customer is looking at which new apps to buy or develop, how they fit into their SOA framework will be a key factor in the decision,” he added.

Graham predicted this could ultimately reduce companies’ demand for traditional business applications. “Over a third of respondents [to the IDG survey] said they are likely to reduce investment in packaged apps as a result of their SOA strategy,” he said. “As SOAs deliver a shorter development cycle, firms will be able to build more tailored applications for smaller workgroups.”

This could even compel application vendors such as SAP and Oracle to change their pricing models to sell application components rather than the entire solution, Graham added.

However, Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton argued that such a seismic shift in the business applications market is unlikely in the foreseeable future. He added that support for composite applications would have to become significantly more widespread to challenge the entrenched position of application vendors within many large companies.

Meanwhile, research published today by IT consultancy Diagonal suggests that SOA systems may not be not as far forward as BEA and IBM claim. In a survey of 100 UK IT chiefs, 55 percent admitted to not being able to undertake a business project because of rigid IT systems, but two thirds said they still saw SOA as just a marketing term.

Mark Williamson, managing director of Diagonal, said the perception of SOA hype was making it difficult for IT directors to get budgets authorised for SOA projects. He advised IT chiefs to address this problem by clearly explaining the business benefits that SOAs can deliver in terms of improved support for flexible business processes.