More than 47 percent of respondents surveyed had already implemented Web services projects, with 34 percent of the respondents who yet to implement, planning to do so within in the next 12 months.
Trudi Johnson, senior project manager at market researcher Taylor Nelson Sofres, which conducted the survey for CSC, said the 150 CIO-level respondents were randomly drawn from a database of 1,732 Australian companies with an annual turnover of more than AU$40 million.
IT budgets for these companies ranged between $65,000 and $160,000 per year, according to information provided by CSC.
CSC commissioned the research in Australia to see how the region stacked up against the US and Europe in terms of commitment to Web services, according to Donal O'Hea, researcher for CSC Research Services.
"Web services isn't a silver bullet to solve all IT problems, but it is being taken up by many companies who see value in sharing functionality across enterprises," O'Hea said. "Companies which want to optimise the links between branches and improve communication across divisions will continue to invest in Web services."
O'Hea believed that the problems facing IT managers included trying to solve the problem of connecting systems within and outside the organisation, both economically and effectively.
He said that CIOs had progressed from regarding Web services with acute scepticism to seriously exploring it as a solution to these problems.
However, in recent reports analysts have warned that the promise of Web services delivering software as a service could be at least a decade away. Others have also commented on the adoption of Web services to date, and standards under development to provide interoperability.
