A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is supposed to bring flexibility to IT resources and lower costs by letting IT personnel reuse software components instead of coding from scratch. However, some experts have suggested that reuse -- the principal justification in most cost-benefit analyses for SOA -- might amount to just 10 percent. Other analysts, such as Bill Rosser, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, have said that "I think the variation is much larger than that. [But] it takes a lot of energy, experience, background and foundation to get to significant savings."
For companies setting up SOAs, those savings may come sometime further down the line, in the longer term, he suggested.
