IBM Unveils New WebSphere Software

The new technology, WebSphere Extended Deployment, is an add-on to IBM's J2EE application server that utilizes, balances and shares network workload among dozens of applications and hundreds of application servers, and can process tens of millions of daily customer transactions, according to IBM, Armonk, N.Y.

Select IBM customers are testing the beta beginning Thursday, and the software will be generally available later this year.

The new software is yet another piece of IBM's broad On Demand strategy, which is aimed at allowing customers to dynamically manage their IT systems, as well as add new resources and provision hardware and software on the fly. The business goal of this plan is to make IT systems more flexible to support constantly changing business processes and demands, as well as to enable systems to work more cost-effectively and efficiently.

IBM Research and the IBM WebSphere product and development team collaborated to create WebSphere Extended Deployment through an IBM technology incubation effort. IBM has more than 21 patents pending for technologies created specifically for the new software.