IBM to Help Clients Advance SOA Strategies, Accelerate Business Transactions

ARMONK, NY.- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new and enhanced services and software that are designed to further simplify the adoption of service oriented architecture (SOA) while also supporting advanced information technology environments. The new offerings are designed to help organizations unite IT and business as they progress from establishing an SOA strategy to being able to flawlessly perform high volume business transactions.
Based on its experience with more than 5,700 SOA customers worldwide, IBM developed the new offerings to address the business and technical needs of both basic and advanced SOA deployments. IBM is applying a combination of industry-leading SOA expertise with decades of transaction processing leadership to help clients simultaneously increase the volume and the integrity of their business transactions.

The new and enhanced products include tools and software to help companies get started with SOA; middleware designed to execute and synchronize business processes; SOA configurations to help IBM customers more easily and securely integrate legacy applications; and professional services to help develop an SOA infrastructure that will support high volume, synchronized business processes.

“As more businesses across industries rely on high volume and complex business transactions, customers are linking together hundreds -- and even thousands -- of business applications, platforms and data sources across their enterprises,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president, IBM Software Group. “The resulting surge in business transactions requires proven software and services to ensure the integrity of these complex business processes and deliver on the promise of SOA.”

Advanced SOA Capabilities
As companies move beyond preliminary pilot and test projects to bridge the gap between IT and business, they need to integrate business processes across a wide variety of platforms, applications and data sources. IBM has found that companies want the agility and flexibility offered by SOA, without sacrificing the integrity of their critical processes and transactions.

IBM is taking advantage of its years of experience building powerful systems for clients that rely on high-volume transaction processing -- such as financial institutions. IBM’s new SOA portfolio is designed to deliver enterprise-class reliability, scalability and security, which are required to help ensure the integrity of critical business processes.

Highlights of the new and enhanced IBM software designed to support end-to-end process integrity include an updated version of IBM WebSphere Process Server, which includes a robust set of features for supporting both long and short-running processes. The product has extensive support for compensation, which helps enable processes to recover reliably when the target applications or services are unavailable.

Other enhanced products designed to support process integrity are WebSphere Message Broker and MQ, which feature enhanced Web services support; Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA, which provides detailed information on service flows across the SOA environment; WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway, which provides hardware-based security for XML and Web services; and IBM Information Server, which is designed to enable information to be provided as reusable services. IBM also offers a variety of professional services supporting process integrity, including SOA Design, Development and Integration Services.

IBM has enhanced its SOA professional services for process integrity, including SOA Design, Development and Integration Services. These services help architect, configure and implement a high volume, transaction-based SOA infrastructure leveraging IBM software products.

A powerful IT infrastructure is also required to support the growing number of transactions across the enterprise, as well as with customers, partners and suppliers. IBM recently beat competitors by 37 percent in an industry benchmark that measures high-volume transaction processing that are typical in today’s customer environments. IBM WebSphere Application Server established record-breaking SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark performance and scalability results involved more than 15,500 concurrent clients and produced 1,197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (jAppServer Operations Per Second), which translates into more than 4.3 million business transactions over the course of the benchmark’s hour long runtime.

Managing SOA Deployments
In an effort to help customers more quickly achieve IT and business benefits, IBM is offering new SOA configurations to help reduce deployment time when reusing legacy and packaged applications in an SOA environment. The SOA configurations provide best practices and step by step implementation guides to help address key SOA implementation challenges. IBM provides expertise to help guide clients in implementing solutions for leveraging legacy packaged applications as well as SOA management and security. The SOA Security and Management configuration provides the solution patterns to assist customers in creating a flexible, robust, and easy to deploy infrastructure for secure and manageable SOA, including key areas such as threat protection, service level management and, service lifecycle management.

To help customers govern business information and safeguard privacy in an SOA, IBM is also introducing IBM Optim, new offerings from the Princeton Softech acquisition. Optim provides facilities designed to support data governance, a fundamental requirement in an SOA. By capturing and managing data at the business record level, Optim helps ensure the integrity and business context of information managed in an SOA environment. In addition, Optim solutions are designed to de-identify confidential data to help safeguard privacy of client and employee data in complex application environments.

IBM is also offering services and tools to support the SOA Governance environment, including WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR), Rational Asset Manager (RAM), Rational Tester for SOA Quality and Rational Performance Tester extension for SOA Quality. These offerings are designed to mitigate business risk by helping customers effectively manage services, assets and processes. New and enhanced professional services for SOA management include service management design and planning for SOA environment, implementation of governance for management and monitoring infrastructure and a testing center of excellence to help ensure end-to-end performance.

Getting Started with SOA
For businesses that want to explore and test the capabilities of an SOA through a low risk, hands-on experience, IBM is introducing the SOA Sandbox. This SOA ’test bed’ is available free of charge on the IBM developerWorks site, IBM’s premier technical resource for software developers, and includes trial software, tutorials, quick start guides, and best practices to accelerate deployments. IBM intends to provide a mix of full version software trials and ’try online’ hosted environments where developers can explore tutorials and get architectural guidance. For example, Rational Software Architect, which is designed to allow developers to rapidly design, develop, assemble, test, profile and deploy Web services and SOA applications -- is now available for both download and online trial as part of the SOA Sandbox. Also, a quick start guide provides step-by-step instructions for installing core SOA software in the users’ environment.

To help companies extend the reach of their SOA while bringing together the business and IT value, IBM supports Web 2.0 capabilities using the same software that supports SOA. Enabling Web 2.0 functionality requires increased infrastructure flexibility, which can be supported by SOA. New Web 2.0 capabilities are included in the latest releases of WebSphere Commerce, WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere Portal, assisting users to create applications, remix content and more easily access services. IBM is also introducing a new IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 that is designed to extend SOA by connecting external Web services, internal SOA services, and Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) objects into highly-interactive Web application interfaces.