IBM to Help Clients Accelerate Business

IBM to Help Clients Advance Service Oriented Architecture Strategies,
Accelerate Business Transactions

IBM today announced new and enhanced services and software that is designed
to further simplify the adoption of service oriented architecture (SOA)
while also supporting advanced information technology environments. The
new offerings are designed to help organisations unite IT and business as
they progress from establishing an SOA strategy to being able to flawlessly
perform high volume business transactions.

Based on its experience with more than 5,700 SOA customers worldwide, IBM
developed the new offerings to address the business and technical needs of
both basic and advanced SOA deployments. IBM is applying a combination of
industry-leading SOA expertise with decades of transaction processing
leadership to help clients simultaneously increase the volume and the
integrity of their business transactions.

The new and enhanced products include tools and software to help companies
get started with SOA; middleware designed to execute and synchronise
business processes; SOA configurations to help IBM customers more easily
and securely integrate legacy applications; and professional services to
help develop an SOA infrastructure that will support high volume,
synchronised business processes.

"As more businesses across industries rely on high volume and complex
business transactions, customers are linking together hundreds -- and even
thousands -- of business applications, platforms and data sources across
their enterprises," said Steve Mills, senior vice president, IBM Software
Group. "The resulting surge in business transactions requires proven
software and services to ensure the integrity of these complex business
processes and deliver on the promise of SOA.”

Advanced SOA Capabilities
As companies move beyond preliminary pilot and test projects to bridge the
gap between IT and business, they need to integrate business processes
across a wide variety of platforms, applications and data sources. IBM has
found that companies want the agility and flexibility offered by SOA,
without sacrificing the integrity of their critical processes and
transactions.

IBM is taking advantage of its years of experience building powerful
systems for clients that rely on high-volume transaction processing -- such
as financial institutions. IBM's new SOA portfolio is designed to deliver
enterprise-class reliability, scalability and security, which are required
to help ensure the integrity of critical business processes.

Highlights of the new and enhanced IBM software designed to support
end-to-end process integrity include an updated version of IBM WebSphere
Process Server, which includes a robust set of features for supporting both
long and short-running processes. The product has extensive support for
compensation, which helps enable processes to recover reliably when the
target applications or services are unavailable.

Other enhanced products designed to support process integrity are WebSphere
Message Broker and MQ, which feature enhanced Web services support; Tivoli
Composite Application Manager for SOA, which provides detailed information
on service flows across the SOA environment; WebSphere DataPower XML
Security Gateway, which provides hardware-based security for XML and Web
services; and IBM Information Server, which is designed to enable
information to be provided as reusable services. IBM also offers a variety
of professional services supporting process integrity, including SOA
Design, Development and Integration Services.

IBM has enhanced its SOA professional services for process integrity,
including SOA Design, Development and Integration Services. These services
help architect, configure and implement a high volume, transaction-based
SOA infrastructure leveraging IBM software products.

A powerful IT infrastructure is also required to support the growing number
of transactions across the enterprise, as well as with customers, partners
and suppliers. IBM recently beat competitors by 37 percent in an industry
benchmark that measures high-volume transaction processing that are typical
in today's customer environments. IBM WebSphere Application Server
established record-breaking SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark performance and
scalability results involved more than 15,500 concurrent clients and
produced 1,197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (jAppServer Operations
Per Second), which translates into more than 4.3 million business
transactions over the course of the benchmark's hour long runtime.

Managing SOA Deployments
In an effort to help customers more quickly achieve IT and business
benefits, IBM is offering new SOA configurations to help reduce deployment
time when reusing legacy and packaged applications in an SOA environment.
The SOA configurations provide best practices and step by step
implementation guides to help address key SOA implementation challenges.
IBM provides expertise to help guide clients in implementing solutions for
leveraging legacy packaged applications as well as SOA management and
security. The SOA Security and Management configuration provides the
solution patterns to assist customers in creating a flexible, robust, and
easy to deploy infrastructure for secure and manageable SOA, including key
areas such as threat protection, service level management and, service
lifecycle management.

To help customers govern business information and safeguard privacy in an
SOA, IBM is also introducing IBM Optim, new offerings from the Princeton
Softech acquisition. Optim provides facilities designed to support data
governance, a fundamental requirement in an SOA. By capturing and managing
data at the business record level, Optim helps ensure the integrity and
business context of information managed in an SOA environment. In
addition, Optim solutions are designed to de-identify confidential data to
help safeguard privacy of client and employee data in complex application
environments.

IBM is also offering services and tools to support the SOA Governance
environment, including WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR),
Rational® Asset Manager (RAM), Rational Tester for SOA Quality and Rational
Performance Tester extension for SOA Quality. These offerings are designed
to mitigate business risk by helping customers effectively manage services,
assets and processes. New and enhanced professional services for SOA
management include service management design and planning for SOA
environment, implementation of governance for management and monitoring
infrastructure and a testing centre of excellence to help ensure end-to-end
performance.

Getting Started with SOA
For businesses that want to explore and test the capabilities of an SOA
through a low risk, hands-on experience, IBM is introducing the SOA
Sandbox. This SOA ‘test bed’ is available free of charge on the IBM
developerWorks site, IBM's premier technical resource for software
developers, and includes trial software, tutorials, quick start guides, and
best practices to accelerate deployments. IBM intends to provide a mix of
full version software trials and ‘try online’ hosted environments where
developers can explore tutorials and get architectural guidance. For
example, Rational Software Architect, which is designed to allow developers
to rapidly design, develop, assemble, test, profile and deploy Web services
and SOA applications -- is now available for both download and online trial
as part of the SOA Sandbox. Also, a quick start guide provides step-by-step
instructions for installing core SOA software in the users' environment.

To help companies extend the reach of their SOA while bringing together the
business and IT value, IBM supports Web 2.0 capabilities using the same
software that supports SOA. Enabling Web 2.0 functionality requires
increased infrastructure flexibility, which can be supported by SOA. New
Web 2.0 capabilities are included in the latest releases of WebSphere
Commerce, WebSphere Message Broker and WebSphere Portal, assisting users to
create applications, remix content and more easily access services. IBM is
also introducing a new IBM WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for
Web 2.0 that is designed to extend SOA by connecting external Web services,
internal SOA services, and Java™ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
objects into highly-interactive Web application interfaces.

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