Companies adopting service oriented architectures (SOAs) spent $1.4m on software and services in 2007, according to a report released today by AMR Research.

The SOA Spending Report 2007-2008 surveyed IT executives from the US, Germany and China.

Primary drivers for investment were identified as meeting the need to change investments faster, more cheaply and with less risk (22 per cent), meeting the requirements of individual projects (18 per cent), and reducing IT costs through reuse (17 per cent).

"SOA adoption and interest varied by industry in some surprising ways," said Ian Finley, research director at AMR Research.

"Financial services, the top revenue vertical reported in vendor interviews, came in at the bottom in our SOA adoption tally.

"On further analysis we discovered that, while a smaller percentage of financial services companies have adopted SOA, those adopters are spending a great deal more on SOA than their peers in other industries.

"In other sectors more of the industry has adopted SOA, but the average company spends a more modest amount."

The study found that 45 per cent of SOA adopters reported spending over $500,000 on SOA software and services in 2007.

Respondents represented a cross-section of companies with 500 to 10,000+ employees in the process and discrete manufacturing, retail, wholesale/distribution, telecoms and financial sectors.