Cost Savings are Real

I have been involved in several implementations of SOA applications in the last 2 years. One of the areas that I have focused on is gathering data on real savings achieved when building applications using pre-built components. CIO's and IT managers have been sceptical of new technologies and the promise of cost savings over the last 2 decades. The same concern is expressed when evaluating SOA and SEEC's business components. I have analyzed data for 2 recent implementations and the summary of my findings are listed below:

• The cost savings were 58% on the first project and 50% on the second. The savings in effort was 10,800 hours and 6305 hours respectively. Both projects involved approximately 20+ components and project duration was 6 months.
• The major savings were observed in the design and development phases ( around 60% lower ). I attribute this to the percentage of code reuse. In one of the projects the total lines of java code was 130,000 and 60,000 lines of code was reused from the out of the box SEEC business components. The savings in effort in the requirements and testing phases was not as high as the other phases but the overall elapsed time taken for completing these phases was lower. This impacts the time to market which is an important factor in software implementations.
• The above savings were achieved without compromising the design goals, loose coupling between the various layers ( UI, business logic, Data Access ). This should result in future savings when making enhancements like handling additional channels or introducing new products or business rules. We currently do not have data on this but will report our findings in future blogs as our customers roll out these applications.