I'll soon have a client report out with interesting Forrester data about how SOA adoption continued apace during the Great Recession. In the meantime, Forrester partnered with TechTarget on a different SOA survey, primarily to TechTarget's readers, wherein we asked a wider range of SOA questions. The bottom line of all this data is that SOA is alive and well.

SOA's strong health is not a surprise (at least not to Forrester), but something else very interesting came out of the survey. To the question, "What is the most significant challenge you are facing with your SOA project/initiative?" the top response was not really about SOA. Instead, by a 2:1 margin over the next response, the biggest challenge was, "Designing how to do SOA in an integrated way with other initiatives (e.g., BPM, events, BI, rules, etc.)." (I describe this in more detail in a write-up over at SearchSOA.com -- you have to register to read the full article.) 

In other words, people are realizing that, in a multi-technology world, siloed approaches to individual technology areas won't cut it. This is the fundamental insight driving Forrester's development of Digital Business Architecture (see Forrester report) and Business Capability Architecture (go to blog post or to another blog post).

Oh and to see more of the data from the TechTarget/Forrester Research State of SOA Survey for 2010, see this write-up by SearchSOA's Matt DeBarros.