IBM Brings Partners Along In SOA Drive

Hoping to accelerate the integration of business processes with services oriented architectures (SOAs), IBM on Tuesday rolled out a raft of new and enhanced WebSphere-based products and services along with an expansion of its SOA Business Partner initiative announced earlier this year.

In concert with the new offerings and beefed-up partner initiative, IBM said it plans to raise the level of integration among three of its core server-based applications and tools including WebSphere, Rational and Tivoli.

Explaining the strategic reasoning behind the announcements, Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Software Group, said an increasing number of corporate accounts have shifted their focus from using technology to automate a range of different tasks to using it to drive business processes and to better accomplish horizontal integration of their businesses.

"CEOs tell us constantly they want to do business transformation and want their CIOs to support a more dynamic and change-oriented environment," Mills said. "Coupled with that is the phenomenon of business de-verticalization, where [CEOs] are turning to outside partners and suppliers to support their business processes. We think these products can help them do that."

To help accelerate this strategy, IBM announced an expansion of its SOA Business Partnership Community, which is delivered through the company's PartnerWorld Industry Networks.

Some of the new benefits and resources for partners include access to the SOA Business Value Toolkit, which helps identify the business return of an SOA project based on industry models, personalized SOA enablement planning and technical support through IBM's Virtual Innovation Center. Partners also get access to IBM's SOA advertising templates, discounts and incentives.

Complementing the added support for the SOA Business Partnership Community and the overall SOA initiative, IBM unveiled new developer resources on developerWorks, including a Podcast series, which serves to catch developers up to the latest technology trends, along with a series of educational materials, including tutorials, to more quickly build skills.

Some analysts see the deepened commitment to partners as a good move, given the company's ambitions to make SOAs more pervasive among its corporate users.

"They are very dependent on partners as they move deeper into this market (SOA) and are committed to them. It will be an educational process depending on the VAR and its constituency around some pieces like the ESB (enterprise service bus)," said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates, consultants in Waltham, Mass.

Perhaps chief among the new WebSphere products is the WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), designed to help with the connectivity and integration of Web services-flavored applications and services. The company is also delivering a new version of the WebSphere Message Broker.

IBM also unveiled the WebSphere Integration Developer, an application development tool based on Eclipse that helps users and developers build and deploy business processes based on SOAs. The new tool will allow creators of composite applications to view existing IT as services that can then be wired together to form a more complete business process.

Another new product is the WebSphere Process Server, which is fueled by IBM's ESB, which reportedly aids in simplifying the integration of business processes that involve people, users and business partners. The new offering essentially makes it easier to move information among applications based on business rules.

As part of the announcement, IBM added some muscle to its existing WebSphere Business Monitor, which now helps monitor business-process performance and important performance indicators. Company officials announced that later this month its Tivoli group plans to announce new management software for composite applications to better help users manage the performance and availability of any number of SOA-based solutions.