Lowering TCO with Composite Applications

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a solution must take into account the initialand ongoing costs of the solution, relative to the solution it replaces. Composite applications based upon SOAs can lower TCO in several ways, including:

• Managing the Services in an SOA is less expensive and complex than managing the interfaces in a traditional integration solution.

• By leveraging the Web Services standards, composite applications lower the cost of proprietary technologies. Standards both level the competitive playing field for vendors, lowering prices generally, and also simplify the task of integration, lowering costs directly.

• Business analysts and technical business users are able to compose applications without the involvement of more expensive IT personnel.

• The more complex a business change is, the more effective SOA-based complications are at reducing the TCO of the solution, because of their inherently flexible nature.

Fundamentally, SOAs provide business an “agility quotient” – the more complex the underlying infrastructure and the more dynamic the business environment, the greater the benefit of an agile architecture to the business. SOAs provide the ability for business users to compose applications, thus creating and managing business processes. However, there is one important piece missing – the user interface itself. If the tools that users interact with are not agile themselves, the benefits of composite applications to the enterprise risk being lost.