Java Reference
In-Depth Information
tools. Creating a service is far more complex than writing a series of classes or a component.
You must put more careful consideration into how the service will be used, and by whom. The
runtime environment for a service can be more volatile, particularly as you grow the number
of service compositions.
A primary benefit of SOA is agility through reuse, and therefore you see the greatest return
the more times a service gets reused, often over a period of many years. There is a little bit of
art and a lot of educated guessing in the work of calculating an ROI. We can't lay out an entire
ROI plan here, but there are some general points to look for:
Improved quality
Because services are vetted through the governance process, and because of their more
manageable level of granularity, services can be developed in a straightforward manner,
monitored closely, and improved without changes to clients. Often services show greater
quality than their application predecessors, which translates into real money.
Increased return on legacy applications
Increased return on legacy applications
By service-enabling or modernizing legacy applications, you extend their functional life,
which increases the value gained by the original legacy applications.
Reduced integration costs
Integrating with purchased systems such as Peoplesoft, SAP, or Oracle Financials can be
expensive, and you typically need to purchase adapters for working directly with their pro-
prietary interfaces. Products that expose a service interface can be much less expensive to
integrate with. Providing a service interface to business partners on unknown systems can
make on-ramping easier, less labor-intensive and error-prone, and more cost-effective.
Reduced traditional application development costs
While this topic focuses on developing services, one key driver of SOA is that it is easier
to put together traditional applications by leveraging services. Within a standard develop-
ment project, introducing an existing service (perhaps created by a third party) to handle
specific functional aspects can reduce costs as well. Moreover, your developers can be
more effectively used if they are orchestrating composite services from existing services
rather than writing custom code for everything. If you have made an investment in SOA
tools offered by the suite vendors (such as Software AG, IBM, TIBCO, etc.), you may
find a drastic reduction in the amount of time it takes to create and deploy service-based
applications. Their tools can require little or no coding to wrap legacy services and build
sophisticated workflows. The time saved can make a good argument for real ROI in SOA.
