IBM fills out SOA product line

It also enhanced its existing WebSphere Business Monitor

September 13, 2005 (IDG News Service)

IBM introduced new products today that fill some gaps in its portfolio of software for integrating applications using the services-oriented-architecture model.
The products include IBM's first take on an enterprise services bus (ESB), a kind of software broker that manages interactions between applications to form a business process. It also announced new services from IBM Global Services to help customers build SOAs.
SOA refers to a design model that can help businesses integrate applications more efficiently and update them without extensive recoding. The services are software programs that carry out particular tasks, such as checking a customer's credit history. They can be reused because they are built using standard interfaces based on the Web services protocols and languages, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol and Extensible Markup Language.
BEA Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Oracle Corp. are all pitching suites of software for building SOAs. A diminishing field of pure-play vendors, such as WebMethods Inc. and Cape Clear Software Inc., also offer SOA products.
IBM has already announced several SOA products, and some of what it unveiled today are updated versions of existing products. It enhanced its WebSphere Business Monitor, for example, to help track the performance of business processes made up of SOA applications.
New products include WebSphere Integration Developer, an Eclipse-based tool for writing programs that link SOA applications to a business process. IBM also unveiled two server products: WebSphere Process Server, for orchestrating a flow of business events, and the ESB.
The new products are expected to ship in the next month or two, IBM said, with pricing to be announced when they are released. More information about the SOAs is available online.
While the Web services technologies are fine for linking two applications, an ESB makes it easier to manage interactions among several applications, said Tom Rosamilia, vice president for WebSphere worldwide research and development. "If I hook up services A, B and C to the bus, I only have to make three connections and the bus then handles the transformation of all the protocols to let any service talk to any other service," he said.
Other companies have already rolled out ESBs. Cape Clear was quick to accuse IBM of "jumping on the bus." It thanked IBM for "validating" the ESB market but said its "hodgepodge" of individual SOA products, which are all part of the WebSphere brand, take too long to figure out and install.
Rosamilia acknowledged that IBM has numerous WebSphere products but said they are well integrated and serve the business at different stages of SOA development, and with different levels of complexity. For companies that want to do "more advanced" brokering than is supported by IBM's ESB, for example, the company is also releasing an update to its WebSphere Message Broker this month. The broker supports a far wider range of protocols than the ESB does, he said.
IBM Global Services also has some new offerings. They include SOA Governance, which will help companies keep track of and measure improvements from their SOA project; and SOA Industry Teams, which will share knowledge and best practices gathered from previous engagements with companies in related vertical industries, IBM said.