Is using SOA more cost effective than other integration approaches ?

In today’s climate, all organizations are trying to reduce costs wherever they can. IT is one of the budget items traditionally hit when times are hard in that many organizations ‘batten down the hatches’ and stop spending on the basis that if it works as it is, then leave it.

However, no business can stand still and IT systems must be maintained to ensure they are still delivering a return for your business. There are two areas where implementing a SOA can save you money.

In the first case, if a project is implemented using a SOA approach but using proprietary interfaces, the costs of the approach will be similar as a similar amount of work is required. However, if a standards based SOA is used, up to 70% of the integration costs can saved due to the following:

-          With the right technology, SOA Services to make existing data or applications available can do this in minutes thus avoiding a large development cost as proprietary ‘plumbing’ to get systems to talk to each other is avoided.

 

-          Unit tests can be built for the SOA Services using off the shelf packages thus saving cost in terms of developing QA unit tests to test proprietary services.

-          Ultimately if the project can work with the existing data and applications effectively from day one, the project can progress as an integrated implementation from day one instead of attempting to join the front and back ends together towards the end of the project as happens in traditional integration projects.

The second part of the cost savings is based on further returns on investment as your organization develops. By using a standards based SOA you can reuse the services created again and again. For each time a service is reused, you are essentially saving the reimplementation of a proprietary version of that service again. Reuse of services also saves costs as follows:

-          Using the same service to do the same thing from multiple channels or technologies ensures that all of your users get the same result and are accessing the same data.

-          A single service ensures that when problems do occur with the service, it is clear what service is a fault and where to find it.
 

-          The standards based SOA approach can ensure that a database of your services is maintained so that programmers into the future can learn how to call the service without the need to understand specifications etc. though of course they will need to understand the data.

The bottom line is that implementing a standards based SOA can save you money up front and well into the future. The SOA Gateway is the ideal tool to implement standards based SOA in your organization.