IBM Takes On IT Services With SOAs

IBM last week unveiled professional services and products as part of a strategy to drive services-oriented architectures (SOAs).

While SOAs have become a rallying point for defining how IT systems should be designed and built, few companies know how to implement them. IBM aims to change that.

"This is the reason we created WebSphere to begin with,to build a platform where you could compose applications and assets as components," said Scott Cosby, program director of WebSphere Business Integration at IBM Software, Somers, N.Y. WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation 5.1 lets customers create and reuse services from new and legacy applications. The server software provides native support of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), which eliminates having to translate between processes during runtime, he said.

The updated WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition 5.1 comes with a process editor and BPEL debugger for describing, building, using and storing business flows. Studio provides a fully enclosed unit test environment for Foundation, Cosby said.

Both products are available now. Foundation costs $49,000 per server processor, including support and maintenance for a year. Studio runs about $7,000 per seat.Four new services from IBM Global Services (IGS) aim to bring software engineering discipline to the task of recasting an enterprise architecture. They include Assessments for Services-Oriented Architectures, Strategy and Planning for Services-Oriented Architectures, Application Renovation and Integration for Services-Oriented Architectures, and Component Business Modeling. Partners eventually will have access to the IGS services, Cosby said.

IBM's SOA strategy "lays out a prescriptive road map of how you get from there to here," said Ed Horst, vice president of marketing at AmberPoint, an Oakland, Calif.-based IBM Advanced partner. "This is what we see companies struggling with."