IBM Targets Problematic SOAs

• By Kurt Mackie
• 10/30/07

Some organizations may not be happy with their service oriented architectures (SOAs). They may have "unhealthy" SOAs as a consequence of partnering with inexperienced system integrators. They may have proprietary SOA technology in the mix, and it may be difficult to scale operations.

IBM is proposing to address this bleak scenario with a new campaign. The company is offering services, consulting sessions and tools--collectively referred to as the "IBM SOA Healthcheck"--to help pump life into flagging SOAs.

The promise of SOA is that data and applications can be exposed as services, which then can be reused across the organization. SOA helps create a more agile IT to meet business objectives. However, implementing and maintaining an SOA requires expertise that IT departments may lack.

And businesses apparently do need help with SOAs.

IBM surveyed its own clients, finding that more than half have "25 percent or less of the skills needed to use SOA to meet long-term business goals," according to an announcement issued by the company.

Organizations can get help from IBM through its SOA health checks. The health checks examine SOAs in terms of application reuse, governance, security, middleware, workload and service management.

The company is also offering two different SOA workshops to organizations:

• The SOA Applications and Services Healthcheck Workshop; and
• The Infrastructure Healthcheck Workshop for SOA.

The first workshop provides assurance and SOA expansion advice over a two- to three-day period. The second workshop involves a high-level assessment of servers, storage, middleware solutions and systems management capabilities over a one- to three-day period.

For those just starting out with SOA, IBM offers packaged solutions. One that the company is promoting is called the Identity Aware Enterprise Service Bus. The package combines WebSphere ESB solutions with Tivoli security and identity management solutions. Security for the system is offered through IBM SOA Professional Services.

More details on IBM's SOA resources can be accessed here.