Service Oriented Architecture — SOA

To help identify projects that can provide the most impact to your business, IBM has developed SOA entry points based on expertise accumulated through thousands of global customer engagements. Building on the IBM SOA Reference Architecture, our SOA entry points are modular projects designed to provide clear, focused objectives in five key areas: people, process, information, reuse, and connectivity. IBM SOA entry points can not only help your organization derive initial value from your SOA initiative, but continue to maximize business value over time as you build on those initial projects.

New tools to extend entry point capabilities

IBM is extending the value of these entry points with new and enhanced software, hardware, and professional services capabilities. We have developed these new offerings for each entry point:

• People: IBM WebSphere Portal provides the ability to dynamically assemble enterprise mashups with easy-to-use SOA capabilities.
• Process: IBM WebSphere Process Server for System z combines process automation capabilities with industry leading quality of service for the System z platform.
• Information: IBM Dynamic Warehousing extends traditional data warehousing and reporting to support more dynamic business insight.
• Reuse: Web Services Feature Pack for IBM WebSphere Application Server helps standardize the reuse of existing investments by leveraging IBM industry leading web services expertise.
• * Connectivity: IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances supports enhanced dynamic service selection and management.

To support the growth of your company and SOA initiative, there is an amplified focus on SOA infrastructure and management. To address your infrastructure and management needs, IBM is announcing new offerings:

• Infrastructure strategy and planning workshop for SOA and infrastructure readiness for SOA offers workshops and assessments to evaluate your organization's infrastructure and IT process effectiveness against business objectives for SOA and IBM's reference architectures and best practices.
• System p Configuration for SOA entry points provides a fully tested configuration of IBM software on System p for SOA to help shorten deployment time.
• Tivoli Federated Identity Manager and Tivoli Composite Application Manager for SOA provides overall improvements to security and management for SOA environments including identity management and transaction performance management.

As you strengthen the alignment between business and IT and build on your initial entry point projects to deliver higher value, business process management (BPM) can help tie together your people, processes, and information. A discipline combining software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate process improvement and facilitate business innovation, BPM provides a common vocabulary for both business and IT to address projects and ultimately help your company better realize its strategic intent.

Continuous enhancement in BPM enabled by SOA

BPM enabled by SOA provides a flexible architectural style in support of efficient process change and rapid process deployment. To help your business get more business value with BPM enabled SOA, IBM is announcing new and enhanced software, hardware, and professional services capabilities including:

• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) enables your business to execute processes with assigned key performance indicators to observe and manage performance.
• IBM WebSphere Business Monitor has been extended to provide broader BAM capabilities across multiple applications, giving your organization the ability to manage performance across a broader environment of process activities.
• BPM on the Mainframe is now even better with process orchestration, adapters, service governance, and content management capabilities available to support a System z environment.
• IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric, which provides a platform for building next generation business solutions, is now available and standardized on the most current WebSphere environment (v6.02 of the WebSphere portfolio); and is also available for new operating systems.
• Industry content packs for WebSphere Business Services Fabric for the insurance and healthcare industry are optional industry-specific reference templates. (Banking and telecommunications packs will be offered in the near future.)
• Integration between FileNet Process Designer and WebSphere Business Modeler has been enhanced to allow models created in WebSphere to be deployed in a FileNet environment.
• IBM BPM enabled by SOA service engagement provides support to integrate your business solutions to accelerate deployment of new business processes, leveraging deep industry expertise, benchmarking best practices, methods, tools, and reference materials.
• IBM BPM methodology has been enhanced and expanded to provide business leaders with a roadmap of execution points to connect overall business strategy with required process capabilities and the relevant BPM software needed to deliver process performance.

Proven SOA governance techniques from IBM can help support your SOA entry initiative. Establish an improved method to promote effective reuse. Gain better oversight and control of your SOA projects and services. SOA governance can help your organization efficiently guide the service lifecycle through design, development, quality testing and eventual retirement, while promoting reuse by making information about the service such as quality of service, fees, descriptions, and locations available. A registry or repository can help centralize information and make it easier to find information about a service. With insight and access to services information you can ensure services are used correctly for effective SOA governance.

Better SOA governance means improved business value

IBM is announcing enhanced offerings to support SOA governance methodologies:

• IBM Rational Asset Manager, a development-time registry, is now compatible with the run-time-focused WebSphere Services Registry and Repository to help track key information about services throughout their lifecycle.
• Tivoli Composite Application Manager now enhanced with service usage monitoring capabilities to allow your users to perform tasks such as identifying heavier users of specific services to charge higher usage fees than groups who use the same service more sparingly.

"We no longer want to invest the time and resources in two- or three-year initiatives. Business is changing so fast these days that we can't afford to roll something into production that represents the thinking of three years ago." — Greg Booker, Head of Group Architecture, St.George Bank

"With IBM software, we're in the process of establishing a flexible, highly integrated IT platform that will not only streamline internal operations, but will also help us expand our offerings to better serve our customers." — Krish Hari Anand, CTO, Indecomm Global Services

"RouteOne provides financing to 22,000 car dealerships across the country. Our business is based completely on Web services. In fact, if Web services didn't exist, we couldn't do what we do here." — Joel Gruber, CIO, RouteOne

Want to learn more about our new offerings? Attend the launch webcast.