IBM has announced new SOA products and services that can help clients respond to rapid changes in the marketplace.
IBM says it is focusing on the areas that clients and business leaders worldwide have identified as the most critical to their success:
• Gaining effective insight into their markets
• Tuning business processes to take advantage of the insights
• Enhancing infrastructures to execute new business processes
• Ensuring they get the most from their talent and expertise
"Today's announcement builds on the experience gained from more than 7,000 SOA client engagements worldwide," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM software sales. "Combined with this experience, our new products and services will help us to increase the value we bring to clients and continue the SOA momentum we have in both established and emerging markets worldwide."
Drawing on an extensive industry background, IBM Global Business Services has compiled SmartBusiness INsight, a series of industry-specific studies. The studies can be used to help clients identify and prioritize strategic initiatives within their organizations and help them set goals and objectives for those initiatives. The studies use industry subject matter experts to analyze macro-level trends and future industry challenges to provide guidance on how SOA is driving new strategies, business models, and operational objectives.
Complementing the SmartBusiness INsight studies is a series of new key agility indicators. The indicators are designed to help clients monitor how rapidly they can react to changes in targeted areas and compare these results to market competitors. The key agility indicators can be imported into IBM WebSphere Business Modeler software to take advantage of the IBM business process management portfolio. The idea is to help businesses set their objectives and begin to outline more responsive processes.
Clients can begin to act on these business-driven initiatives with a growing portfolio of industry-specific solutions that draw upon IBM's extensive hardware, software, and services. Based on open standards, these solutions build upon IBM's industry framework strategy and provide a roadmap of pre-tested applications developed by both IBM and its business partners. As part of today's announcement, IBM is introducing new industry frameworks for product development integration, chemicals and petroleum, and defense and public safety. Clients, such as the state of Missouri have already begun to benefit from the new frameworks.
"IBM successfully implemented the Missouri Emergency Response Information System (MERIS) with this pre-integrated solution and framework approach," said David Finch, special assistant to the director for Homeland Security, Missouri. "We received a state-of-the-art emergency management system on time, and for less cost."
As businesses move from planning to action they can take advantage of the new SmartSOA Sandbox from IBM. A sandbox provides a testing arena that allows clients to validate applications before bringing them into their production environments. The IBM sandbox provides a mix of full-version software trials and hosted environments where business leaders and their employees can gain hands-on SOA experience and education. The SOA Sandbox allows clients to experience IBM middleware without having to install it locally.
Clients can further hone their skills and interact with a global community by using the IBM Smart SOA Social Network. Users can enhance and augment their skills through IBM's SOA training, certifications, and through the support of the industry's strongest SOA business partner community. This training has been updated to include more role-based and inter-disciplinary features.
QuickStart for WebSphere DataPower
To help clients further simplify their SOA deployments and integrate existing Web services and legacy applications, IBM is adding to its existing QuickStart portfolio of WebSphere Application Server and Portal offerings with the announcement of the new QuickStart for WebSphere DataPower. These fixed-scope services let clients address multiple core infrastructure issues through an integrated offering, in this case, linking WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances with services from IBM Global Technology Services (GTS). By using a proven services methodology, delivery assets and mentoring, IBM can help clients quickly take advantage of an SOA to address business challenges identified through their key agility indicators.
New Versions of SOA Components
IBM is announcing several new versions of key components within the SOA portfolio, including WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere MQ, as well as the availability of WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition. This expansion of MQ will introduce file transfer services that use an MQ backbone to enable clients to simplify the transfer and auditing of files and documents. This is crucial for financial organizations that must comply with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley that require the accurate tracking and filing of data.
Identity Assessment and Strategy Services
Once SOA is deployed, security and governance are often identified as additional points of concern by many clients. To meet these concerns, IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) is announcing new Identity Assessment and Strategy Services that use proven IBM methodologies and tools to help organizations quickly and effectively generate a comprehensive strategy and roadmap based on their unique business challenges and needs. With a comprehensive strategy in place, enterprises can more easily implement a centralized role-based identity and access management program resulting in enhanced regulatory compliance capabilities, greater security, streamlined access for authorized users, and reduced overall costs and IT complexity. IBM is also announcing a new set of software that helps enhance a client's control of their SOA environment and deployments. These products span the entire IBM software portfolio and include:
• Establishing a culture of collaborative innovation through a range of unified, security-rich communications; real-time content services such as blogs, wikis and profiles, and enterprise portals supporting Web 2.0 features such as mashups.
• A new edition of the IBM Mashup Center which allows rapid assembly of situational applications by end-user knowledge workers.
• Telelogic System Architect which facilitates strategy, analysis, and planning of the IT portfolio to ensure alignment of investments with business priorities.
• Tivoli Security Policy Manager that provides a unified SOA security policy for management and enforcement.
• New InfoSphere Foundational Tools that help discover where key data is stored across source systems and analyze how best to pull it together into new processes and services.
IBM maintains that it is a worldwide SOA leader with a 64 percent share of the market, according to IT analyst Wintergreen. IBM announced it now has more than 7,020 client engagements, 7,420 SOA business partners, 300 SOA-specific technology patents, a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, and more than 2,000 universities advancing the SOA curriculum.
For more information on how IBM is helping clients make smarter, faster decisions by using SOA, visit: http://www.ibm.com/soa.
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