For every service-oriented architecture (SOA) success story, there lays an abandoned SOA project stuck in one of the various stages of deployment.

Underscoring the successes and challenges of an SOA project is the popularized theory that 50 percent of IT projects are deemed unsuccessful. This, of course, can make embarking on an SOA strategy rather intimidating.

Still, SOAs remain at the top of the executive and IT agenda based on their ability to more closely align technology with the needs of the business. Quickly dismantling the high statistics associated with IT project failures, SOAs have shown demonstrable ROI.

In fact, the proven successes of SOAs have enabled this segment to swell to a worldwide market opportunity of $60.3 billion. This growth is up by 75 percent compared to 2005 when the market was estimated at $34.6 billion.

Moreover, the SOA market is expected to skyrocket with an anticipated 54 percent continued growth through 2008 to reach $143 billion, according to IT industry analyst Gartner. Furthering the growth of the SOA market is the strategy's ability to pay for itself quickly.

In fact, the number of opportunities for quick return on investment can be surprising. For example, many organizations are unaware of the number of duplicate processes that occur in separate departments and applications and how much these duplicate processes are costing them.

When you examine the costs and lost revenue attributable to redundant function and duplicated effort, you begin to see the value of centralized services over having to manage multiple competing and overlapping functions.

Still, there are some watchers out there asking: "How can SOA succeed where previous approaches have failed? How do I avoid becoming a statistic?"

These are powerful questions. Simply stated, a successful SOA strategy can be achieved because the standards, best practices and governance models have finally matured to the point where reuse can actually work.