IBM Pushes Services-Oriented Architecture With New Products, Services

The new rallying point defining how IT systems should be designed and built, SOAs encompass discrete bits of business processes that can be invoked and reused as functions. Called on as a service--meaning they stand at the ready should another function need them--these components can string together other processes and data to create new applications practically on demand. Being standards-based, services can easily interact over disparate platforms.

But while most IT organizations now accept the benefits of a services architecture, few know how to achieve one. Big Blue aims to change that with new server software for creating reusable services out of their existing applications, an updated development tool for writing and debugging process flows and four new IBM Global Services (IGS) offerings that show customers what's involved in converting buzzwords into practicality.

"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, IBM Software's program director of WebSphere Business Integration, Somers, N.Y.

Carrying the WebSphere version numbering, the brand-new WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation 5.1 allows customers to create and reuse services from new and legacy applications. The server software provides native support of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a standard now gaining importance for orchestrating how process components interact. Native BPEL support eliminates having to translate between processes during runtime, said Cosby. "The idea of having a function as a Web service is interesting, but it's when you string them together that BPEL gets important," said Cosby.

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The updated WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition v5.1 now comes with a process editor and BPEL debugger for describing, building, using and storing business flows. According to Cosby, Studio provides a fully enclosed unit test environment for Foundation, enabling developers to build and then safely deploy services.

Available now, both products support Windows, Linux, HP/UX, Solaris 9 and the operating systems for IBM's iSeries (AS/400) and zSeries (mainframe) servers. Foundation costs $49,000 per server processor, including support and maintenance for a year. Studio is approximately $7,000 per seat.

But despite the tangible nature of actual products, it's IGS' professional offerings that will make most sense of a difficult concept. That's because all four services bring software engineering discipline to the task of recasting an enterprise architecture.

It starts with the Assessments for Services-Oriented Architectures service, where IGS evaluates the technical and functional aspects of what customers want to achieve. This early stage service casts a particular eye on levels of service, quality, availability and functional granularity.

The Strategy and Planning for Services Oriented Architectures examines which business processes should be converted into services, assesses their business benefits and examines the underlying steps of each process.

In the Application Renovation and Integration for Services Oriented Architectures, IGS evaluates whether legacy applications and data stores can even participate in an SOA, then works to update those applications so they can be exposed as services.

And in the Component Business Modeling service, IGS will break down a business into a set of discrete activities supported by people, process and systems. This exercise enables customers to benchmark how their processes actually perform so they can identify those that need improvement. Business executives need to determine which activities have the highest priority for services conversion.

Will partners eventually have access to IGS' methodologies? "They are part of our strategy and will be brought in," said Cosby, who declined to elaborate how, exactly. "[For now], partners can look at the Foundation Sever and Studio as a way to get familiar with BPEL." Cosby said IBM will offer online training on various SOA technologies and issues.

"What we like about the announcement is it 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., developer of Web services management software, and an IBM Advanced Partner. "This is what we see companies struggling with."

Of course IBM competitors--notably BEA Systems, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard--could also claim that they provide an SOA road map. BEA, especially, can grab bragging rights as being among the first major vendor to deliver an actual product for building a services-focused architecture: WebLogic 8.1. What's more, the theme at BEA's eWorld conference in San Francisco next month is, that's right, SOAs.

"We have a long history of this," said Erik Frieberg, BEA's senior director of product marketing. "At eWorld, BEA will unveil Project Sierra--a strategic vision of SOAs that permeates our products, services and how customers engage with us."

But while IBM may not be first to the SOA party, it's not late, either, said Ron Schmelzer from research firm Zapthink. "The BEA SOA story is a product-centric story. With IBM, it's a services story. The classic complaint is that IBM's products are a grab bag of things that don't work well together. That's now changing. With this vision they're setting the framework by which their products will be used together to architecturally solve integration."