IBM pushes service-oriented apps

Will eighty percent of IT projects benefit?

IBM has announced a slew of products to help firms build and deploy applications using service-oriented architectures (SOAs). Experts say SOAs build on the ideas behind web services so that apps can be automatically provisioned and scaled depending on needs.

Analyst firm Gartner recently predicted that 80 percent of IT projects will use SOAs to accomplish their goals by 2008. IBM forecast that the worldwide market for SOA middleware will be worth $3.4bn by 2006.

Tom Rosamilia, IBM vice-president of application and integration middleware R&D, said, "We have seen a growing interest in SOAs recently. Today we're announcing a comprehensive set of capabilities through products that address the whole gamut of SOA. Customers won't necessarily want all of this now, but we think it's better to buy from a vendor that can give you all of this now, or give you some now and the rest eventually."

Rosamilia said controlling the flow of business processes is an important element of SOAs. "It's important because it enables responses to events to be automated," he added. "To support that we have announced WebSphere Process Server, which is our first implementation of this new process engine concept. Previously we had a product that supported the Business Process Execution Language [BPEL], called WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation, but Process Server brings together all these elements and replaces it."

Process Server will be available from 29 September.

Among the tools announced last week were WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Business Monitor, which can monitor key performance indicators to help with business process modelling.

"Many firms want to simulate customer behaviour and see what impact it has on the business," Rosamilia said. "For example, does a supermarket need more people on the checkouts, or more people working in the meat department? They want to simulate these changes and test to see if they produce the results that they wanted."