*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in ebizQ’s SOA Supplement in InfoWorld. This topic and related ones will be discussed November 15th and 16th at ebizQ's virtual SOA in Action Conference. Sign up here!

Washington Group International, a construction and project management company, is finding one of the most visible benefits of its emerging service-oriented architecture is service reuse.

A number of the firm’s applications now can access its document management system through a single service. “In the past, we had to build point-to-point connections between every application and the document management backend,” relates Rich Colton, application integration manager for the Boise, Idaho-based company. With Web services, we’ve only had to implement an API in one place. Then we built a series of components around a Web service that our applications can use.”

The benefits of this service reuse cut across both the information technology and business sides, Colton explains. “If the vendor upgrades its API, we only have to upgrade that API in one place. For the business, there’s better quality of data, and avoiding the cost of managing multiple processes.”

Hewlett Packard – which has been applying service-oriented architecture to its own infrastructure – reports enormous savings as a result of service reuse. To date, the IT company has 30 composite and 68 discreet or component SOA services in production, shared across 88 internal organizations across the globe. To measure the value of its service reuse, HP performs a what-if analysis against a scenario in which SOA-based reuse is not implemented. “Compared with a non-SOA approach, we’ve actually estimated a savings of $30 million dollars already just in the last two years,” says Parag Doshi, practice principle for HP Consulting's SOA Practice. “We project over $70 million in savings in four years.”

For HP, such savings is due to not only to retiring of assets, but also the reduced development costs and maintenance costs for duplicate services, Doshi says.

A growing number of companies are discovering the advantages of service reuse as a way to achieve cost reduction, simplification, and more business agility. Many enterprises have long been wrestling with the complexities and duplication inherent in countless redundant systems across multiple business units. Ideally, a single instance of a service –centrally developed, maintained, and tested – could be shared across an unlimited number of business units. This is the very core of SOA’s value proposition, with services needing to be only developed once, and then made available to the rest of the enterprise through a registry.

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