## 7 Discussion and Conclusions  
The paper contributes to literature with a literature review combined with a case study, comprising five cases spanning various manufacturing and process industry contexts as well as a large-scale RDI project's use cases, the results of which point to the fact that there is a potential for improvements exceeding 50% regarding time/efforts during parts of a lifecycle concerning development and operation of automation solutions by using an SOA-based platform supporting microservices. However, there are prerequisites in terms of changes required in work processes and acquisition of competencies and skills to fill before these benefits can be achieved. Further, the paper makes an addition to practice by indicating which needs to change in terms of thinking and architecture that can be used in business development and prototype situations in order to quickly move from idea to test, and then speedily and seamlessly to a real implementation. In addition, the managerial contribution of the paper is an indication that there is a need to change how to work in orderto be able to use the potential power of an SOA-based platform, the need to meet a number of pre-conditions, such as skills and competencies required, and get over the threshold to be able to use an SOA-based platform. The threshold applies not only to the own organization or company, but to the value-chain(s) participated in and how interoperable these are. Thus, to be able to reap significant benefits and leverage on the improvements, well-considered managerial work and efforts are required in order to succeed. The results presented in Table 2 are aligned with the quantified results of previous studies [22; 23]. Further, the literature review also provides a strong indication that a lot can be improved in terms of less engineering effort, time and costs for development, operation and maintenance (i.e., the whole lifecycle) of professional automation systems, if moving away from the old way and architectures used when developing such (cf. [1; 2; 34; 4; 9; 35; 36]). However, these indications are not quantified. This reinforces the motive for investigating the use of an SOA-based platform supporting microservices (if not already doing so) during development and operation of automation solutions. To provide better transparency on the measurements of improvements regarding effort/time/cost achieved, it would be beneficial to have a common and accepted method allowing cross-comparisons of outcomes (cf., [24]). Thus, it is possible to question the details of the results in this study, but the overall indication clearly points in a positive direction. Further, the results of this study are important, as there are a great many developers and operators of automation solutions, such as software developers, industrial integrators, manufacturing, and process industries along with critical infrastructures. All these actors are together very important for business- and society-related value-chains, and they need to stay competitive and profitable to endure tough times and continue to develop. The case study's proposition also brings up the need to investigate for change at the case companies and within their value-chains; here, the critical part is to decide to start using an SOA-based platform supporting microservices, change the work processes to agile, define a new architecture based on microservices and SOA principles, and acquire necessary skills and competencies. This also requires partners, providers, and third parties to also future-proof their solutions in order to enable interoperability, security, easy integrations, and efficient operations with high availability.