Saw this post by Galen Gruman. "The number of companies investing in service-oriented architecture (SOA) has doubled over the past year in every part of the world, with a typical annual spend of nearly $1.4 million, according to a new research report from the analyst firm AMR Research that surveyed 405 companies in the U.S., Germany, and China." You know, when you read something like this a letdown is coming. "N Saw this post by Galen Gruman. “The number of companies investing in service-oriented architecture (SOA) has doubled over the past year in every part of the world, with a typical annual spend of nearly $1.4 million, according to a new research report from the analyst firm AMR Research that surveyed 405 companies in the U.S., Germany, and China.” You know, when you read something like this a letdown is coming. “Now the bad news: ‘Hundreds of millions of dollars will be invested pursuing these markets in 2008, much of it wasted,’ said AMR analyst Ian Finley. The AMR survey found that most companies don’t really know why they are investing in SOA, which Finley said makes long-term commitment iffy.” He goes on to site some of things you’ve heard from me before, namely that… ” Another danger seen from the SOA survey is that the main benefit that the vendors sell around SOA (code reuse) is not the real benefit that early SOA adopters have gotten. Often the code from project A is irrelevant to project B, he noted. That focus on reuse can cause organizations to dismiss SOA’s benefits because they’re looking at the wrong metric.” Of course, I’ve already been down this road, several times in fact. The core issue is that reuse, as a notion, is not core to the value of SOA…never has, never will. Not that you won’t achieve reuse, and that there is benefit, but that the value of agility, or creating an architecture that’s changeable around the needs of the business is far more valuable than any services you can share. To the point of this post, people chase SOA understanding that reuse is the core value. Thus, when it’s not they consider SOA a failure. To the point of the author “they are looking at the wrong metric.” We need to stop selling reuse as a core benefit of SOA. Software Development