Despite all the hype surrounding service oriented architecture (SOA), Australian IT executives are still grappling with this new concept and struggling to understand how it fits within their enterprise.

New research shows that an overall lack of awareness of SOA is a key factor constraining wider adoption.

During a visit to Australia last week, Gary Barnett, a UK-based research director at Ovum, said SOA topped the agenda when speaking to clients.

Barnett met with 10 government agencies during his visit including Centrelink and the Australian Customs Service.

"They wanted to know how SOA actually works in practice and how to develop a business case," Barnett said.

There is definitely a high level of interest, he said, but clients are still working to understand how they can migrate to SOA.

Only this week Springboard Research released a survey of 2615 IT executives in Australia, China, India and Singapore which found only 21 percent understood the SOA concept.

It found that in the Asia region there is a serious lack of awareness about SOA although all of the major IT vendors are banking on SOA as part of their growth strategy.

Springboard Research vice president Dane Anderson said it is clear more needs to be done to educate the market.

"While there has been considerable hype about SOA in the market, adequate awareness is not filtering down to the enterprise level, which will become an adoption roadblock unless more education and market awareness takes place," Anderson said.

The research found that 54 percent of organizations that have deployed SOA were using it to achieve application integration. The second highest category, at 27 percent, was utilizing SOA to deliver Web services and Web applications.

When examining why organizations were not deploying SOA, 28 percent said they were not sure if it would deliver any real benefits while only 9 percent blamed lack of funding.