IBM at its Connect 2007 conference today made a case for using services to prevent an "SOA mismatch". As it turns out, companies are investing in SOAs because it saves IT cost.

Speeding up application development allows companies to more quickly respond to new business trends, but try measuring that effect. Early SOA adopters take the time savings and apply it to their IT bottom line. Without an IT benefit, they fail to build a case for SOA.

22 May 2007

Furthermore, you don't want to be caught with an SOA that is misaligned to your business. If your application take another road than your business processes, you'll have a hard time expanding your network, cautioned IBM software chief Steve Mills.

IBM's solution involves business services. No surprise there.

But there is another risk to SOAs: more than half of all the SOA projects fail because companies focus on reusing internal code only – even if that code is not that great. As it turns out, writing software services that can run in a componentized way is different from writing black box applications.

Besides, why build if you can buy from outsourcing? One analyst firm projects that service sales for SOAs will reach $17bn by 2013.

IBM's senior vice president of software Steve Mills