IBM Wednesday touched off new software and services to help companies craft Service-oriented architectures (SOA)
on the fly according to changes in business needs.
The news includes
software
from the Armonk, N.Y. company’s WebSphere line, as well as SOA service
plans, courtesy of IBM’s Global Services (IGS) division.
At a basic level, SOAs are architectures for distributed computing and
shared services that employ reusable standard interfaces to integrate
applications within a company. This is important because most of
today’s
applications are sealed off from “communicating” with other
applications,
making it almost impossible for businesses processes to affect change.
SOAs, which could include, but are not limited to, processes such as
Web
services
matching a flexible SOA with an equally flexible business process
through
specifications such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL),
reduced
from having month-long approval process to weeks, or days, according to
IBM.
To wit, new products such as WebSphere Business Integration Server
Foundation allow customers to build and integrate applications within
SOAs,
according to Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services for IGS.
“This is the first time we’ve combined an application server and
integration
server to help customers create reusable services out of their existing
Web
services and packaged applications and combine services to link
business
processes with software applications,” Liebow told
internetnews.com.
The software also features native support for BPEL.
Given that SOAs are written to be dynamic and act upon changing
business
climates, it makes sense that Big Blue would tout them as an integral
part
of its e-business on-demand strategy for offering customers greater
control
and flexibility over the computing they require. This won the approval
of at
least one analyst, ZapThink’s Jason Bloomberg.
“What’s most exciting about IBM’s announcement is that they insist that
On
Demand businesses must have SOAs,” Bloomberg told
internetnews.com.
“IBM has never tied their broad On Demand vision to SOA so tightly
before,
and should definitely serve as a wakeup call for those companies still
struggling with the SOA value proposition.”
Rivals BEA, Microsoft
and
Oracle
have already announced SOA strategies and products.
Liebow, who recently took the SOA torch
from IBM’s products and standards colleagues, said his team has created
a
number of service offerings to help customers get their SOAs up and
running.
For example, he said IBM Assessments for Services Oriented
Architectures
will help customers using SOAs to gauge their progress. This degree of
consulting extends to IGS’ Strategy and Planning for SOAs, which charts
a
business services map identifying business service candidates, vision,
building blocks, governance model, a reference model architecture and a
transition plan.
For customers with data in legacy systems, the executive said IGS will
offer
Application Renovation and Integration for SOAs, which will help
customers
figure out if it is worth their effort to expose legacy data and link
it
with new business processes in the SOA.
While he applauded IBM for what he called “ambitious” plans that
finally
make use of BPEL, Bloomberg said IBM has some work to do before it can lay
claim to the SOA crown, particularly in the areas of management,
modeling,
and IBM’s componentization effort to bring its software products to
one modular code base.
“We expect to see a series of follow-on announcements from IBM as these
pieces fall into place,” the analyst said. “Secondly, the predominant
value
to IBM customers in this announcement is the combination of the
software and
the range of professional services offerings, including roadmaps, best
practices, training, etc. For those companies who would like to take
advantage of IBM’s software but go elsewhere for consulting, IBM’s SOA
value
proposition isn’t as strong.”
