Only one third of service-oriented architecture projects deliver a return on investment, according to new research published by Nucleus Research.

The survey quizzed 106 organisations on their use of SOA development practices, and only 37% of those that had done so reported any RoI.

There was some increase developer productivity in 28% of the respondent organisations that were using SOA, but in many cases it was not sufficient to justify the cost of SOA adoption.

And according to the research, only 32% of published services are reused. Code reuse is often put forward as the principle cost benefit of SOA.

David O’Connell, senior analyst at Nucleus Research, said that antipathy towards reuse among developers may be at the root of the disappointing RoI statistics.

“Developers often view themselves as creators of code and applications and shun SOA because it forces them to reuse code generated by others," he said.

But O’Connell added that he expects RoI rates for SOA to improve as vendors release more application functionality as pre-wrapped services. “If, and when, the vendor community reallocates some of their SOA marketing funds and uses them to build the application layer, then we'll see widespread SOA adoption and reuse," he said.

Further reading 

Nucleus Research press release
Information Age feature - Structural hazard - the pitfalls of SOA