Gearing Up For A Services-Oriented World

IBM Global Services (IGS) set out to change that situation last month by introducing professional services and products for building services-oriented architectures (SOAs).

An SOA acts as an underlying layer that enables services,stand-alone business processes that can be invoked and reused as functional components,to move across disparate systems.

Trouble is, this is tough stuff to explain to potential customers.

It is IGS' goal to make this concept more tangible. IGS starts by assessing what customers can hope to achieve from services. It then evaluates the underlying steps involved in different business processes and determines if older systems can even participate in an SOA. Finally, IGS figures out which processes deliver the greatest return as services.

Solution providers, ISV partners and systems integrators say they expect to benefit from IGS' efforts. "What we like about the recent announcement is it tries to lay out a prescriptive road map, with how you get there from here," said Ed Horst, vice president of AmberPoint, an IBM ISV partner in Oakland, Calif., that provides Web services management software.

Does it matter that IBM's contribution is largely a professional services road map? Not according to Horst. "I don't know that you need to have a lot more stuff than where people are in the adoption curve, anyway," he said.

In other words, IGS' services give customers a mental framework for recasting an enterprise architecture. "The challenge with Web services from the start has been explaining the concept to the customer," said Ray Velez, senior technical director of SBI.Razorfish, a New York services company. "Any tool or communication that explains them to the client will definitely help us."

IBM's efforts to help companies visualize SOAs could benefit solution providers outside its own channel, said Douglas Nassaur, president and CEO of True North Technology, a Sun Microsystems partner in Alpharetta, Ga.

"I spend three weeks just to get up to ground zero where customers can understand Sun's Java technology, its role in an SOA, and why it matters," Nassaur said. "IBM's announcement lowers the cost of the sale for us and decreases the time to market."