I'm in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink's Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I'll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We've posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term "SOA" can polarize some IT teams - it's an "either/or" decision at the architectural level.

Talking to our EMEA director, Wilfred, he says part of the reason it seems adoption is high in Europe is that it SOA is often driven by developers working in smaller teams. Service-orientation can be started on a much smaller scale, and tested pragmatically before rollout to the larger organization. So, SOA there doesn't need to be an enterprise-level initiative in all cases, it can be something the company dabbles in before making a full commitment.

The upside of this pragmatic approach is that the SOA project can leverage some small wins to pay for a bigger commitment. The downside? Companies still need to beware of publishing services without a higher level of architectural coordination between teams.

This isn't to say that there aren't also companies in Europe starting from a strong enterprise architecture perspective and defining a top-down approach to SOA. I look forward to meeting both the pragmatists and the strategists this week!