53 percent of companies have adopted Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and those companies, on average, are spending $1.4 million on SOA implementation. 45 percent of adopters are spending over $500,000. And the acceptance rate of the technology is growing at 100 percent in Germany, China and the US. That’s the conclusion of a report by AMR Research based on data collected for 2007.
The report found that the primary reason people are choosing to use SOA is because it provides greater flexibility with plug-and-play in swapping technology investments — 22 percent. 18 percent said that SOA helped them achieve the goals of a particular project. And 17 percent see SOA as a way to achieve greater software reuse.
The low numbers of people deploying SOA for reuse has some people questioning whether claimed benefits from SOA are being realized. The AMR report suggests that the huge sums that organizations are spending on SOA may be wasted money — reuse isn’t being achieved and many companies don’t have well-defined SOA strategies. David Linthicum defends against these naysayers:
The core issue is that reuse, as a notion, is not core to the value of SOA…never has, never will. Not that you won’t achieve reuse, and that there is benefit, but that the value of agility, or creating an architecture that’s changeable around the needs of the business is far more valuable than any services you can share. To the point of this post, people chase SOA understanding that reuse is the core value. Thus, when it’s not they consider SOA a failure…. We need to stop selling reuse as a core benefit of SOA.
