After reading this ZapThink report, it occurs to me that I’m still in the wrong business. If only someone had said to me, “Loraine, forget writing. Go learn about SOA,” life would be good. Real good.

How good? According to ZapThink, senior SOA consultants can charge up to $500 per hour. A typical onshore SOA architecture team will cost around $200-300 per hour as an average per-person cost for the team as a whole, it notes. You’ll get a slight discount for offshore consultants — the price drops to a “mere” $100-200.

But as this article explains, many bids for SOA consultants may not reflect the true costs. In fact, you’re likely to get widely different quotes from SOA consultants and, oddly, the big firms are likely to bid incredibly lower than mid-size and boutique SOA consultancies.

You’ll be tempted to think that there’s some sort of efficiency of scale going on there, but ZapThink says that’s not the case.

ZapThink contends large firms are pulling a bait-and-switch on clients by bringing in top-notch SOA consultants to sell the service, but when it comes time to deliver, these big companies bring in college graduates to do that actual work. And, as you might expect, they tend to lack the experience and training needed to deliver a full SOA.

Read more at: IT Business Edge