The number of organizations planning to adopt for the first time decreased to 25 percent; it had been 53 percent in last year's survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2008. This dramatic falloff has been happening since the beginning of 2008, Gartner said.

Gartner has been doing the survey for five years, and this is the first time the numbers dropped, said analyst Dan Sholler, research vice president at Gartner. "What we're seeing is that there are a bunch of organizations [that] for a variety of reasons don't expect to be doing anything specific about SOA next year," Sholler said.

This year's survey saw a decline in the growth rate for SOA, he stressed. Overall, organizations expect to be doing fewer projects next year, with the economy contributing to that to a degree, Sholler said. Organizations also may be doing fewer things for which SOA applies, he said.

A growing number of large organizations are deferring plans to utilize SOA, the study found. Fifty-three percent of respondents already were using SOA. Meanwhile, 20 percent of respondents were building event-driven architectures and 20 percent had plans to do so in the next 12 months.

Use of modern programming environments is closely associated with SOA, Gartner said. This suggests that more organizations are focusing on SOA in the context of new developments that use Java, Microsoft .Net, and dynamic languages like Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Organizations must ponder options when applying SOA in legacy programming environments because skills in blending the two likely will be scarce, Gartner said.