IBM sets forth on the innovation landscape armed with SOA

If there was any lingering doubt about IBM's commitment to service-oriented architecture (SOA), the company unequivocally dispelled it with a flood of SOA-related announcements on April 3, including 11 new products, 20 enhancements, and eight service offerings.

"What stands out is the sheer breadth of the announcements," says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst of ZapThink, an IT advisory and analysis firm based in Waltham, Mass. "Because SOA is strategic to all its users, it is strategic to IBM. SOA has become the overall direction for its entire software effort, and strategic to its consulting business as well. The entire company is moving toward SOA."

"SOA has become the only option for organizing heterogeneous enterprise IT resources," Bloomberg states. "It is an architectural approach for managing IT assets to better meet the needs of business in a flexible way."

And it seems announcements-as-a-barrage comprises a portion of IBM's SOA awareness strategy.

"It's part of the drum beat," says Dennis Gaughan, a director with Boston-based AMR Research. "Since announcing its SOA strategy last September, IBM has consistently hit on messaging the role it as a company wants to play. For IBM, SOA is the capability that enables [its branding theme] 'Innovation that matters.'" While an AMR market study completed last year revealed IBM as the top-of-mind vendor for SOA adoption and initiatives, "IBM is on a major push around innovation," says Sandy Carter, VP of IBM WebSphere and SOA. "Our customers are looking for ways to grow their businesses and they see innovation as the way to do that."

Carter segments the innovation push into three areas: extending collaboration internally and externally; leveraging information to make better business decisions; and business process innovation. The April deliverables are designed as "points to accelerate entry and growth," she explains, with concentration on five fundamentals:

• Process management: Modeling processes and then assessing the impact of changes;
• Information as a service: Using data and other information to make better business decisions;
• People: Aggregating a view that enables interaction;
• IT connectivity: Establishing a network for information and applications; and
• Reuse: Tap into existing application software functionality.

The first three, says Carter, are business-centric, with the remainder being IT-centric. "Reuse probably is the biggest entry point today in terms of value," she says. "Unlike other technologies that you have to 'rip-and-replace,' the key value proposition for SOA is reuse."

The key to effective reuse, adds Carter, is a service registry and depository in which services or application functions can be catalogued and stored for continual reuse. ROI, says Carter, is possible in many forms.

"One car manufacturer assessed the way it defines parts and found it had 77 ways of doing it. The reason it had 77 ways was no one knew they were all using the same service," explains Carter. By defining it once where it can be reused and shared by all, the burden of software maintenance was greatly reduced, she adds.

IBM also is extracting benefit from SOA in its own operations, reducing software development cycle time by 20 percent, and the cost of new releases by 25 percent. Some of that savings, no doubt, is being used to capitalize the projected $1-billion annual investment the company is making in the new technology.