IBM announced new service-oriented architecture design Centers at an inaugural event in Toronto Tuesday.
SOAs
Jason Weisser, vice president of Enterprise Integration at IBM, said
SOAs typify IBM’s strategy to move customers to e-business on-demand
environments and expunge cost and complexity.
Weisser told internetnews.com that to better bridge the gap
between
customers and its software, IBM has opened SOA Design Centers in
Austin,
Texas, Beijing, Delhi and Hursley, U.K., where IBM customers can build
SOAs
using IBM’s WebSphere products.
The news is the centerpiece of the inaugural IBM CIO Summit on SOA in
Toronto this week, which the executive said is a way for IBM to work
with
customers on SOAs. IBM is working in the endeavor with automotive retailer Pep Boys, telco MCI, online auction eBay, and
financial
services firm Charles Schwab.
At the centers, customers and business partners can work through tough
business problems. Work from customers and partners is then fed back
into
the IBM software development process to be used in future iterations of
IBM
products, such as WebSphere Application Server and integration software
and
Tivoli’s infrastructure management and security software.
“Unlike other demo centers or prototype centers where someone spits out
a
bunch of code, these centers are actually an extension of our
development
labs where we build the products,” Weisser said.
Weisser said work completed at the IBM SOA Design Center is different
from,
yet complements efforts of the IBM Global Services SOA Centers of
Excellence, which use IBM Business Consulting Service to help clients
in
vertical industries identify business processes using an SOA.
Because crafting an SOA is such a nascent approach to marrying software
integration with business processes, the race is stocked with many
horses.
IBM unveiled
WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation last month and is
looking
to lead the charge.
But it is facing competition from usual rivals BEA Systems , Oracle
and Microsoft
,
as well as a slew of smaller vendors looking to enable SOAs, including
Infravio and Cape
Clear.
BEA is hawking
SOA portals — and is expected to unveil a crystallized SOA strategy at
its
conference next week. Oracle has designed
a
developer kit to work with its application server.
Microsoft is busy preparing Indigo, an SOA and interoperable platform
for
Web services, as a major piece to its next-generation Windows operating
system, Longhorn.
Research firm IDC recently said services firms’ worldwide Web
services-related revenue will increase exponentially in 2004 as
companies
continue to turn to strategic and long-term decisions around adopting
standards-based SOAs. IBM wants to be at the forefront of this
explosion.
But perhaps more telling of IBM’s leadership position is how Weisser
came to
IBM. He left Microsoft to join IBM a year and a half ago because he
shared
more in common with Big Blue than the Redmond, Wash. company from a
philosophical standpoint.
“I looked at both sides and said to myself that I really believed that
IBM
had figured it out and that the other company I was with really hadn’t
gotten to the place that I was comfortable with,” Weisser said.
The executive said Microsoft and others seem to throw technology at
business
problems to solve them while IBM considers the business issue first,
then
applies technology tailored to it. This was more consistent with his
mode of
thinking, he said.
But even philosophical likenesses weren’t enough to jumpstart SOA work
until
recently. For that, Weisser said progress in building Web services,
grid and
other standards have paved the way for more complete work in the
software
development space.
Web Services Security (WS-Security) is one. The Web Services
Interoperability organization published a draft of the security profile today. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is another key spec in the works to tie business processes with SOAs and Web services.
