Study Confirms Service Reuse Reduces Project Cycle Time
Tuesday 15 November 2005Reuse through SOA is cutting costs and increasing agility, survey confirms.
A new analyst report documents that enterprises are enhancing IT responsiveness and agility while realizing "significant" business benefits as a result of thier SOA implementations. The analysis, produced by Nucleus Research, was based on interviews with companies at various stages of SOA and Web services rollouts.
Nucleus found that 30 to 75 percent of enterprise-wide projects were enhanced by the reuse of existing services. As a result, enterprises were able to reduce the programming component of project cycle time between 25 and 45 percent, the analyst firm said.
""Adopting a service-oriented architecture enables companies to shorten IT project cycles, improve IT agility and better align their IT practices with overall company strategy while gaining tactical returns from integration," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research for Nucleus.
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The research firm found that companies reported SOA to play a direct role in increasing market share, building strategic partnerships, increasing revenues and improving customer service.
The study also found that, on the average, users maintained central service repositories of between 25 and 60 services capable of reuse.
In addition, companies interviewed said that the percentage of projects enterprise-wide that was enhanced by reuse of existing services was between 30 percent and 75 percent. One user indicated that 80 percent of its integration-focused projects was enhanced by service reuse. Users also said that service reuse caused reductions to the programming portion of project cycle time of between 25 percent and 45 percent.
One of the principal business benefits reported by users was the role that an SOA played in growing top-line revenue, as enterprises were able to improve the overall agility of their IT departments as well as their long-term alignment with line-of-business objectives.
Among the examples cited, the report found that a retirement fund administrator was able to win significant business and achieve a number one market share position by successfully employing an SOA to streamline new customer acquisitions. Likewise, a technology distributor credited $200 million in incremental revenue growth to SOA, which allowed the company to rapidly fill the void left by another firm's exit of a key market.
Additionally, a major cell phone manufacturer indicated "With the reuse of already existing business logic in the ERP system, we created the Web front end in virtually no time." Similarly, a leading global distributor of electronic components indicated "The biggest benefit from a technical standpoint was the creation of a completely generic and reusable framework for rapidly on-ramping future EDI customers. In essence, what was formerly a development effort by technical resources is now more of a mapping exercise."
Nucleus Research conducted the study among end-user companies in the webMethods customer base. The final report is available via download by visiting http://www.webMethods.com/ROI4SOA .