Lately, there's been a lot of consternation across the industry questioning the whole "reuse" paradigm around SOA. The greatest value in SOA -- at least in the early phases -- comes from the ability to 'write once, deploy often.' Business units seeking functionality through services do not need to reinvent (and pay) for the wheel; that wheel may already be in production, maintained, and tested in another part of the enterprise.
However, no good idea goes unquestioned, and, lately, some have been asking whether businesses can, or even willingly, effectively reuse (or share) services. This argument, of course, cuts right to the heart and soul of SOA. In a recent issue of his newsletter, .NET and Web services guru David Chappell observed that the same issues that dampened reuse in object-oriented programming now plague service oriented architecture. For the most part, these are organizational roadblocks, he wrote. Not only are there financial disincentives to sharing code over the wall, but "creating services that can be reused requires predicting the future. Doing this is very difficult–how can a service’s creators accurately guess what future applications will need?" The 'If you build it, they will come' approach is tough to turn into real reuse."
To look at the value and adoption of reuse, LogicLibrary has just issued a study of its early adopter customers, and found the concept is providing a return on investment. (A PDF of the report is available here.) The study found that respondents had, at this point, anywhere between 10 to 60 services in production, with an average of about 26 services.
The study's authors, Jeffrey Poulin and Alan Himler, start off by injecting some common sense to the ROI formula they developed -- that reuse is not “free.” In fact, the cost of building a reusable service is up to 50 percent more than the cost for a similar piece of proprietary software for one-time use. They observe that "setting up the people, training, processes, tools, and components that fit into that architecture requires an initial investment and commitment from the development organization."
The study goes on to find, however, that with reuse, this initial investment quickly pays for itself. The study looked at more traditional component-based reuse, then at SOA-based service reuse. The study's authors conclude that after an initial learning curve, the development costs for reusing an SOA service are about half the costs required for traditional component-based development and integration, which represents about a 90 percent total savings over development from scratch. They go on to calculate that SOA-based services show a positive ROI after only 1.3 uses, compared to an ROI after 1.7 uses of a component in traditional development. In other words, an SOA component will pay for itself the first time it is reused within another business process.
This study is one of the first to quantify that there are economic advantages to reuse/sharing through SOA. The value of SOA is increasingly being proven. However, as David Chappell points out, your organizational ducks need to be lined up in a row.
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