According to a Gartner research report from 2006, 44% of smaller companies (fewer than 1,000 employees), said that deploying Service Oriented Architecture is a high or critical priority. Among SOA’s more natural constituency, big companies (40,000 or more staffers), a hefty 67% reported they would be using SOA by the end of 2006.

But as SOA’s inevitability grows, a question is still asked – skeptically – by cost-conscious IT managers: What is the return on investment for SOA?

However, this isn’t the most effective question to ask, says Gartner analyst Randy Heffner. As he wrote in his report about how businesses pay for SOA, “Any attempt to assign a specific ROI to SOA should be viewed with heavy skepticism.”