The big, bad SOA project is dead. Yet the benefits of service-oriented architecture, experts say, have never been more significant or widespread. It’s an odd contradiction. How did we get here?

SOA enables the rapid creation of new applications as well as the integration of existing applications through software components called Web services. An enterprise service bus (ESB) is commonly used to integrate applications. Until this year, IT pros had an easy time getting multiyear, multimillion-dollar SOA projects funded, including a full suite of SOA middleware. That all changed with the economic collapse of 2008.

“You can’t sell this to the business anymore,” says Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst with the Burton Group, a consultancy headquartered in Atlanta, Ga. When the financial crisis hit, big SOA projects were first on the chopping block because of their size, cost and lack of easily demonstrable return on investment, the analyst says. In one blog post, she likened the economic crisis that began last year to an asteroid sending the big SOA dinosaur to extinction. Nonetheless, companies that deployed SOA when purse strings were looser are reaping the benefits now.

Irish Life Investment Managers (ILIM) in Dublin, Ireland, began its SOA journey in 2006 by getting corporate backing for a $400,000 investment in Oracle Fusion SOA middleware. Arnaud Benjacar, integration architect at ILIM, a branch of Irish Life and Permanent Group, an investment firm that has E28 billion under management, concedes that getting such funding today would be a “different kettle of fish.”

Using Fusion, ILIM created Fund Setup, an application for establishing new investment vehicles. By building the fund-creation process as a business service on Fusion’s Enterprise Service Bus, Fund Setup can integrate with ILIM’s back end systems. Fund Setup eliminates an error-prone, paper-based process, enabling a new fund to be launched and ready for investment in a single day, according to Benjacar.

From the start, Toronto Hydro, an Ontario, Canada, electrical power company, wanted a rapid SOA implementation that could deliver a demonstrable return quickly, according to Nicholas Yee, chief technology officer with Int3s, a Toronto integrator specializing in Red Hat’s JBoss middleware.

In September 2008, Toronto Hydro Corp. went live with Smart Meter, an application that gives customers information about electrical rates at peak and off-peak hours so they can plan their electrical consumption in the most economical manner.         

Smart meter devices – digital instruments that replace the traditional electro-mechanical power meter – have been installed on 700,000 dwellings and businesses sending data every 15 minutes across a wireless mesh network to collection meters. From there, the data is transmitted to a central database from which it is fed via a JBoss ESB into a data management repository.

With the ESB in place, Toronto Hydro and Int3s have been looking at other projects with solid business case and have since found seven. Among them are an asset management application and a project to migrate from a legacy customer information system to a new one.