Carphone Warehouse has revealed that the business services it has created within its service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy become cost effective when they are reused three times.

The company first embarked on its SOA project two and a half years ago and has so far deployed 2,000 business services, or software components, that are designed to automate a specific business process. The idea was to build business services once that could be reused where appropriate across the company’s different lines of business.

Carphone Warehouse enterprise architect Pawel Maszczyk, speaking at an IDC conference on SOA in London in March, said: “It costs 30 per cent more to build a reusable service compared with a one-off custom service that works.”

With the additional costs required to reuse the system and for governance, this means that a reusable one that is deployed twice ends up costing the same to design and build as if a point solution had been created in each case.

Maszczyk added: “Once you use the solution for the third time, you start to save money.”
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