Much attention has been paid in recent years to upgrading utility grids worldwide to cut global energy costs. According to a recent Grid Net report, the deployment of a service oriented architecture for telecom networks may help them become the "ultimate advanced" smart grids.

The report identifies a supporting broadband communication network and a network management system as the base for a telecom's ultimate smart grid.

An SOA approach, Grid Net contends, allows for the necessary functionality and smoothest path for achieving an ultimate grid.

"The foundation of the project will be an information technology back office designed to support access to a common database from applications and process more data than has been managed within any information technology back office," according to the report.

Many companies and organizations already have plans in place for an SOA approach, according to a recent survey conducted by AppDynamics. In polling 140 IT professionals, the report revealed that 66 percent of companies plan to utilize SOA for mission-critical applications. A majority of respondents already operate apps in a service-oriented architecture.