SOA project with a billion-dollar price tag

For those of you debating whether to commit $75,000 here or $150,000 there for SOA-based projects, here's some news to keep things in perspective. Bob Brewin over at NextGov reports that the service oriented architecture approach that the US Department of Defense intends to deploy to integrate the DoD's health records with those of the Veteran's Administration may run more than $1.2 billion.

It's not clear from the 476-page appropriations document where and how this money will be spent, whether the bulk of it will go into consulting, services, software, or perhaps a humongous, see-all do-all Enterprise Service Bus. But the US government is apparently getting serious about SOA. But then again, a billion isn't a whole lot in government circles.