New IBM SOA software and services targets four key growth areas

The new offerings, based on IBM's experience with nearly 3,000 SOA customers and 2,500 business partners, are focused on the following four areas: the use of business process management (BPM) to exploit the benefits of a standards-based SOA; governance as the cornerstone of SOA success; preparing IT infrastructures for SOA; and creating industry-specialized SOA services. In total, IBM is announcing 21 new and enhanced products and 13 new professional services offerings.

IBM also announced the results from its Institute for Business Values Study. The new study, "The Business Value of Service-Oriented Architecture," found that 92 percent of IBM SOA customers stated that cost reduction was the initial justification for initiating an SOA project and that, on average, customers realized 51 percent revenue growth as a result of an SOA strategy.

"SOA is a fundamental shift in technology that will continue to significantly impact business, said Bashar Kilani, Software Group manager IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. "With the early adopter phase behind us and SOA software capabilities deemed as table stakes, the next logical evolution in this market will be ensuring that vendors and customers have the resources and skills available to make the most of their SOA investments."

Ensuring BPM Success with Standards-based SOA strategy Companies use business process management software to gain greater insight and better manage, monitor and improve business processes to drive innovation. However, the true value of BPM is delivered through the combination of software and services expertise. This strategy enables customers to facilitate business innovation in the BPM lifecycle of business modeling, collaborative development, business monitoring and continuous process improvement within a flexible architecture that can easily adapt to planned and unplanned changes that impact business.

IBM's expertise in BPM is evidenced by the new BPM Engagement Framework and the BPM Competency Center. The BPM Engagement Framework allows customers to accelerate BPM adoption through a combination of BPM services expertise, best practices and in-depth knowledge of the various BPM methodologies.

The IBM BPM Competency Center was created by meshing IBM's field and lab process expertise to provide customers with access to a team of experts with deep industry knowledge of the definition and implementation of SOA and BPM. The Competency Center team has demonstrated proficiency in technical knowledge for process optimization and innovation and is further strengthened by the collective efforts of the 400 IBM SOA Business Partners who are specialized in BPM.

The IBM Workplace Dashboard Framework provides customers with reusable service-oriented components, advanced administration tools and the ability to create standards-based active dashboards. The IBM Workplace for Business Strategy Execution is a dashboard that allows users to monitor their own goals and objectives, link those objectives to others in the company, and gain greater insight into how specific objectives map to an organization's overall strategy.

Governance: the Cornerstone of SOA Success IBM is announcing a new comprehensive methodology for SOA governance - a series of policies and processes for ensuring successful SOA projects.

This methodology is based on IBM's experience with SOA customers worldwide, consults at IBM's 11 Global Centers of SOA Excellence, and the company's own, internal deployment of SOA.

IBM's focus on governance culminated in the release of the new WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR). WSRR software helps customers manage web services and shared business processes across a four stage lifecycle:
discovery, service development, change and release management, and operational efficiency and resilience. WSRR builds upon the IBM Rational offerings for software development, governed service build and delivery, and architectural analysis.

Preparing IT infrastructure for SOA

IBM's legacy-to-SOA service offerings provide service capabilities to transform legacy applications into flexible, componentized and reusable business assets. In addition, IBM is also announcing new SOA infrastructure products and services for management, security and virtualization to help customers ready their IT infrastructure as they expand beyond first SOA entry point projects.

New IBM security services will help assure scalable and sustainable security beyond the user level as businesses expand the use of SOA across the organization. These four new services are the SOA Application Security Assessment, SOA Security Requirements, SOA Security Architecture, and SOA Security Implementation.

As customers expand their use of SOA, new IT management demands can arise. IBM offers new IT management services that are designed to help customers gain insight, visibility and control of management systems. These new services -- Enterprise SOA Management, Business of IT Dashboard and Testing Center of Excellence for SOA -- will help customers prepare to better manage IT processes, manage transaction workflows, manage and automate processes, and predict and manage change.