This article is from IBM's Smart Strategies Newsletter. To read more of the newsletter, which features Webinars, Webcasts and IBM brochures on SOA, click right here.

Service reuse -- the core value proposition of service oriented architecture -- isn't just the latest technology management theory waiting to be put into practice. Organizations are employing service reuse today, and seeing significant results in the form of reduced application development and maintenance costs, simplified and streamlined operations, and greater business agility.

In this interview with Smart SOA Strategies, Craig Hayman, Vice President, WebSphere, Application and Integration Middleware Software Division of the IBM Software Group, talks about the issues and opportunities service reuse presents, and how success is already being achieved.

Q: How closely is the success of SOA linked to the degree of service reuse within an enterprise?

Hayman: Reuse is very much a part of SOA. It's part of the simplicity of SOA, and in linking services together to solve an end-to-end business problem or process. That's where we have taken steps to help customers, no matter where they start -- whether they're coming from an application sever, where they're able to link to existing services or create new services, or a message broker or enterprise service bus.

Q: What are the best ways to encourage reuse of services across the enterprise? Is this an organizational challenge (requiring tools such as developer incentives), or can this be automated?

Hayman: The era where people try to create the ultimate service, and force people to reuse it, is over. Rather, we're seeing organizations working to discover which of the services follow the best practices of their organizations, and encouraging their adoption.

Our goal is to find a way to help organizations do that, either through the discovery of services, or even decisions on services that are beginning to be reused, and placing them into a registry and repository.

Q: What types of applications or services are the best candidates for reuse, and how can organizations best identify those candidate services?