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“SOA is undergoing mass adoption by organizations that are looking for more economic justification for their initial SOA projects. SOA is establishing itself as a de facto technology standard for implementing software architectures for increased flexibility and simplified integration.”

Considering this trend, provider of business software, SAP has announced findings of a research effort conducted with the University of St. Gallen that shows IT projects based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) improve software reusability, reduce operations cost and offer substantial process efficiencies.

According to a press release, findings of the study will be presented to attendees at SAPPHIRE 2008, an international customer conference in Berlin, Germany starting from May 19-21.

The study focuses on the SOA business-value proof points that organizations are using to convey the benefits of an SOA strategy to decision makers. To enable best practices sharing, SAP cooperated with the University of St. Gallen, which specializes in business and information management research, to interact with SAP and non-SAP customers spanning industries such as financial services, telecommunications, media and the public sector in this research.

Key findings from the study reflect that customers view the business case for SOA in two different ways. The first is an IT-centric approach in which the benefits of the SOA technical infrastructure and organization are the driving factors behind implementation. This approach values the IT savings that SOA can bring through its ‘reuse of services,’ or the efficiency gains experienced through reduced software-development time and cost.

According to Prof. Dr. Robert Winter, Institute of Information Management at University of St. Gallen, “this study reveals that service orientation significantly improves the reusability of software functionality. In mature organizations, we found an average reuse rate of four, which leads to considerable IT consolidation and cost-saving potential. However, strict governance is absolutely vital.”

The second approach uses the IT-centric method as one component in a broader, more comprehensive foray into evaluating SOA. “The major benefit of SOA unfolds on the business-process side. We achieve increased process efficiency of between 10 to 30 percent, and also benefit from improved process quality due to consistent data and role-specific process design. This is only possible if you closely align your IT with the business and design services along process needs,” said Gerhard Thomas, CEO, Burda Digital Systems.

“This study as an installment in the qualitative research and feedback that SAP is constantly collecting from its customers. This study shows many SOA projects start without an explicit business case, but the need for proving value increases rapidly down the road of SOA adoption. This is incredibly useful for us, for we are able to take this feedback and work closely with current and prospective customers on how to maximize SOA,” Patrick Frerichs, consulting director for SAP said.