IBM Recognizes Partners for Driving Innovation and Business Impact

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today recognized three Business Partners for their outstanding dedication to building and implementing innovative solutions using IBM’s WebSphere platform. IBM’s first annual WebSphere IMPACT Awards recognize partners for providing customers with cutting-edge solutions based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and integration with WebSphere. The awards are being presented at IMPACT 2007, IBM’s first annual worldwide customer event focused on the burgeoning $160 billion SOA market.

SOA refers to a business strategy that allows companies of all sizes to reuse their existing investments in software and hardware so that their businesses are run more efficiently. The partners being recognized today have demonstrated a unique ability to develop and sell SOA solutions that solve customer challenges in nontraditional ways to improve efficiency, flexibility, and control of key business processes.

The three IMPACT Award winners and award finalists include:

IBM IMPACT Business Partner Solution Award - Lawson Software

The IBM IMPACT Business Partner Solution Award recognizes Lawson Software for illustrating the strength of integrating with WebSphere to solve customer challenges, while delivering proven impact in the marketplace. This solution exemplifies strong collaboration across a range of constituents and programs, and demonstrates the unique power of using IBM SOA and WebSphere components in its delivery to customers.

The Lawson System Foundation product provides customers with an SOA-capable technology, messaging and integration platform based on the world’s leading middleware stack from IBM including WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, WebSphere MQ, Tivoli and DB2. Lawson System Foundation helps customers protect their legacy investments while providing them with a very robust, sensible SOA platform that can either plug into their enterprise architectures or become their enterprise architecture of choice.

The two distinguished finalists for the IBM IMPACT Business Partner Solution award are Capitalware and Logic Library.

IBM IMPACT Innovation Award - Ascendant Technology

The IBM IMPACT Innovation Award recognizes Ascendant Technology for their innovation in delivering WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Business Integration solutions built on IBM software and strategy SOA and WebSphere capabilities. Ascendant provides service accelerators that have helped many organizations, including Austin Energy, adopt SOA and gain rapid business value. These accelerators include: BaseLine, a jumpstart methodology for business integration; WebSphere Catalyst for Commerce, an XML-based content integrator; and the WebSphere Installation and Configuration Automation (WICA) framework.

The two distinguished finalists for the IBM IMPACT Innovation Award are Actuate and Brulant.

IBM IMPACT SOA Process Solution Award - Prolifics, a JYACC Company

The IBM IMPACT SOA Process Solution Award recognizes Prolifics for providing customers and business partners with an effective and efficient way to get started with SOA through the “Process” IBM SOA entry point. The solution provides specific tools and services to help streamline and improve processes across the enterprise, which has helped customers improve their efficiency, flexibility, and control of their key business processes.

Prolifics, by implementing a solution using an IBM WebSphere SOA foundation, has enabled Southside Electric Cooperative to increase productivity, integrate information and processes across multiple functional areas, reduce response time to its customers, enable improved and accurate reporting to FEMA, and increase ROI.

The two distinguished finalists for the IBM IMPACT SOA Process Solution Aware are Emericon and Dexterra.

“These partners have embraced the SOA strategy and have established a leadership position in their respective markets,” states Sandy Carter, Vice President of Strategy, Marketing, and Channels for IBM SOA and WebSphere. “IBM continues to work closely with its partner community to develop and sell solutions to help customers around the world realize the benefits of SOA and WebSphere.”

Business Partner Momentum

Last month, IBM announced that more than 3,600 partners have joined IBM’s SOA Partner Program, which is more than triple the amount of partners enrolled at this time last year. Depending on their level in the program, Business Partners have access to a range of software, services, tools, education, marketing and sales benefits. In addition, partners can benefit from Web-based sales and technical support delivered through IBM’s Virtual Innovation Centers to help their customers with mission critical SOA projects.

Since the program was announced last year, more than 145 Business Partners have been accepted to the IBM SOA Specialty, which is the highest level where Business Partners receive the most benefits. This requires Business Partners to complete rigorous SOA technical and business requirements, and align with IBM’s software and strategy for SOA.

IBM’s SOA Business Catalog, also announced last year, continues to grow. The Catalog now contains more than 3,800 IBM and Business Partner-developed SOA software assets used to solve specific business problems. More than half of these assets are from Business Partners.

IBM will continue to work with Business Partners on applying SOA to strategic, mission critical projects. As customers continue to make SOA a more critical part of their business, they will have to ensure that they plan for the scalability, reliability, and performance that they will need going forward. Many of our Business Partners work with IBM to provide customers with strategic insights on their growing SOA initiatives. IBM is expanding its SOA Certification portfolio with a new SOA Advanced Practitioner certification that will be available later this year.

For additional information please visit. www.ibm.com/press/impact2007