Inter-application integration has emerged as the top technology priority for IT bosses in 2007. According to a recent report carried out by analyst group Forrester Research among 341 IT decision-makers, organisations are striving for seamless interoperability between their core business applications, with the goal of maximising efficiency and generating substantial cost savings.

After integration and the perennial of business priorities – upgrading to security – the adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS) featured high in the key challenges of IT leaders over the coming year.

But not all. The survey revealed that less than half of those questioned were familiar with SOA. Of those familiar, though, 40% are currently using SOA in some capacity and a further 23% plan to implement it over the coming year. Representatives from larger businesses said that the primary driver in pursuing SOA was the flexibility it delivered to the business.

Considering their use of SOA within their organisations, 83% said that it facilitated internal integration, 43% believed that it is useful as a tool for strategic business transformation and a further 28% said that SOA was currently used within their organisations to aid external integration.

Meanwhile, SaaS is also attracting attention from large enterprises, with 41% of those questioned saying that they are either very interested in it, piloting it or using it. Surprisingly, it seems to be more attractive to large organisations; according to the study just 20% of medium-sized and 14% of small businesses have shown significant interest.

The most widely implemented use of SaaS was for HR applications, with 55% of respondents applying the approach for this purpose. Other uses include messaging systems such as email, calendaring, etc (52%); security (48%), supply chain management (45%), customer relationship management (38%) and enterprise resource planning (31%).