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Why should we invest in SOA, Forrester's Randy Heffner asked?

Randy said (and I have to confirm this) that the SOA adoption rate is 35 to 40 percent for small to medium sized firms and it becomes a higher percentage as the firms get larger.

"Today, SOA is a cost for doing business," Randy said.

You can justify SOA on a strategic level, on a soft money level and on a hard money level.

Foundational (soft money) SOA investments are business sponsored and there is a lot of targeted SOA R&D to build exactly the kind of infrastructure that is needed to optimize the business.

SOA for application integration has more varied costs, from free SOA capabilities of the application platform, like .NET, to custom built SOA repositories and governance monitoriing frameworks, which are likely to result in a 25% reduction in solution cost (hard money).

There's also "pay-as-you-go" optimitzaton (SaaS) that can be deployed, versus packaged applications.

There are also many really important investments needed to attain SOA maturity, such as governance, tooling evaluations, service-delivery lifecycle, service design patterns evaluation and service value measurement.

Some words of wisdom from Randy:

"Remember, SOA is an approach, not the solution. Don't let the tail wag the dog!"

"Focus first on redirected money, for SOA vision and strategy."

"Go as far as you can on solution money. Let the benefits drive more demand. Let the pain drive SOA investment, so you know exactly why you're buying it."

"Be very careful with pure SOA money."

"Don't use lack of funding as an excuse."

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