The Four Hundred--IBM Shifts Its SOA Initiative Up Into High Gear

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Volume 14, Number 37 -- September 19, 2005

IBM Shifts Its SOA Initiative Up Into High Gear

by Mary Lou Roberts

SOA, or service-oriented architecture, is the wave of the future, if you believe the likes of IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. SOA is touted to be the way to integrate applications across the enterprise. By breaking these applications into reusable, componentized units of work ("services"), the goal is to piece them together across diverse platforms and databases to better and to more quickly respond to changing business needs.

We've written a fair amount on SOA before in The Four Hundred, including predictions by some that SOA will benefit the iSeries community greatly by making the iSeries a more vital and long-lasting part of the enterprise and making it a player on a par with other server platforms.

If such predictions are valid, the iSeries community should be jumping for joy at IBM's announcement on September 13 that it is beefing up its SOA offerings in a big way. The emphasis of the announcement, of course, is on "new software, services, and an expanded partner initiative to help clients manage business processes" with SOA. But one needs only to read further in the press release's headline to learn that much of the emphasis is on WebSphere enhancements: "New WebSphere Software is Foundation for SOA."

Specifically, the IBM announcement features its "SOA foundation software" that includes the following components:

WebSphere Business Modeler: A tool that enables the modeling and design of process flow before deployment and complements SOA modeling capabilities of Rational Software Architect.
WebSphere Integration Developer: An Eclipse-based application development tool that lets developers assemble SOAs, making it easy to "view IT as services that can be easily wired together to compose full business processes."
WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB): To help in deployment. The ESB provides connectivity and integration for web-services applications and includes a new version of WebSphere Message Broker.
WebSphere Process Server: Open standards-based software powered by the ESB that helps to simplify the integration of business processes and the movement of information between applications based on business rules.
Enhancements to WebSphere Business Monitor: To help monitor business process performance and key performance indicators. Later this month, Tivoli will also be announcing new software to help in the management of performance and availability of SOA-based solutions.

Also included in the announcement are new services that IBM will provide through IBM Global Services (IGS) to help customers implement SOA:

SOA Governance will help companies keep SOA initiatives, architectures, and investments aligned to business goals.
SOA Industry Teams are aligned to key verticals (communications, distribution, financial services, industrial, public sector, and small and medium business) will help customers ease deployment and will tap into the expertise of IBM Business Consulting Services "to help customers use IBM's WebSphere software as the foundation for SOA."
IGS will use the SOA Foundation "to deliver its upcoming Common Services Delivery Platform (CSDP), a repository of reusable assets, based on IBM software and third party applications that will execute specific business processes such as claims processing or inventory management."
A free service, the IBM Client Architectural Readiness Evaluation, will help clients review business and IT initiatives and architectural alignment.

Rounding out the SOA announcement was an expansion of the SOA Business Partner Community, delivered through IBM's PartnerWorld Industry Networks, that offers new benefits and resources to participants who already include several iSeries ISVs including Bowstreet, Cognos, Lawson Software (and its soon to be acquired Intentia International), Seagull Software, and SSA Global.

During the announcement teleconference, IBM general manager for WebSphere, Robert LeBlanc, touted the accomplishments of office supply giant Staples, an early adopter of SOA that worked together with IBM using WebSphere to build a "single, seamless view of their customer set across multiple channels," and they did it on the iSeries. Despite Staples success with SOA on the iSeries, there has been a fair amount of resistance within the iSeries community to WebSphere, and there has hardly been a stampede to SOA. Will this new thrust by IBM make a difference? For the most part, iSeries ISVs are enthusiastic.

Bowstreet is one of the already-signed-up partners in IBM's SOA Partner Initiative. Rose O'Donnell, vice president of engineering, notes that Bowstreet has worked closely with IBM on a number of fronts with this initiative, "the most obvious being Portal. Portal is a natural to fit with SOA architectures, so we will continue to be a close partner."

O'Donnell anticipates that iSeries users who are part of a larger enterprise will be quite interested in SOA and suggests that smaller businesses could also find solid benefits in the more flexible architecture that SOA offers. She also believes that this IBM announcement will make WebSphere more attractive to the iSeries audience. "IBM has invested enormous effort in making WebSphere and its supporting tools and technologies available specifically for the iSeries customer, and they've done an excellent job of making it compatible with WebSphere on other platforms. Recognizing the significant investment of time, intellectual property, and money that iSeries customers have in existing applications and the fact that very few customers run iSeries alone, IBM's SOA approach further provides a clear path to enable those applications to work with other systems and other applications."

Kim Addington, executive vice president of Seagull, which is also signed up with the IBM SOA Partner Initiative program, strongly believes that iSeries shops can and will be interested, despite their size. "Because SOA makes it easier for IT departments to react to business change quickly, it has the potential to impact businesses of any size--directly or indirectly. For example, if the many iSeries ISVs who provide technology to SMBs begin to enhance their applications with SOA characteristics and enable the business process to drive the technology (versus the technology driving the business process), SMBs will become more agile."

Furthermore, Addington echoes the sentiments of many by pointing out that this announcement by IBM goes a long way toward giving credibility to the SOA concept. "In one sense, IBM is our market-maker. So IBM's backing legitimizes the SOA concept and helps to grow the market opportunity for companies like Seagull Software. IBM's sweeping endorsement of SOA is good for our niche." Addington does fear, however, that the cost and complexity of WebSphere can be an inhibitor for small and medium iSeries shops. "This announcement doesn't yet solve that problem, but the promise of integrated SOA technologies can definitely make some of the complexity go away.

John Siniscal, president of LANSA, comments that "IBM is finally taking SOA seriously. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have already made significant product announcements around SOA, so it was necessary for IBM to clarify its plans. This will certainly be of interest to larger iSeries shops and to the applications vendor software community." He also believes that the announcement will increase the awareness of SOA as a mainstream architecture that needs to be adopted in future development plans.

While Siniscal predicts that iSeries shops that have already adopted WebSphere will see this announcement as an important move by IBM, he doubts "that SMB customers will be any more interested in this announcement than they are in using WebSphere. In most cases, it's overkill for them. Those most likely affected are the ones whose applications software vendors adopt WebSphere and SOA in their future releases. Most SMB customers do not have the depth of IT staff to do WebSphere and SOA on their own."

Jared Rodriguez, founder of Skyway Software, believes that IBM's thrust "validates SOA and is a natural evolution of software development similar to the component base evolution that has been taking place in the manufacturing sector for the last hundred years. This should be of interest to iSeries customers in a broader sense, as IBM, along with SAP, BEA, and others, to name a few, are moving in a direction of reusable, service-based components based on industry standards."

The underlying implementation--in IBM's case, WebSphere--is not important, says Rodriquez. "The infrastructure components will be come les important and more commodities, which will allow organizations to implement business solutions and not worry or care about the underlying infrastructure."

Rodriguez believes that IBM's initiative will not have much overall impact on the iSeries community in the short term, but that it will instead validate and substantiate the concept and direction of SOA. "Companies will be looking at and considering SOA in the planning of a company's future infrastructure, software development, and deployment."

Suneet Shah, chief technology officer for Diamelle Technologies, an early adopter of SOA, is watching IBM's moves in the SOA arena with great interest. "We do believe that it is something that will interest iSeries customers as it will simplify the effort to integrate and make accessible solutions and services that are currently running on the iSeries."

Shah believes that IBM's enhancements to WebSphere to increase SOA capabilities will make WebSphere itself more attractive to iSeries users. "In our industry, there are the technically savvy 'early adopters' who 'get it' and understand the benefits of the technology. Whether everyone else follows remains to be seen. But WebSphere has a growing following."

Some disagree. On the topic of WebSphere, Duncan Kenzie, president of Business Computer Design's technical support, suggests that by tying SOA to WebSphere, IBM may be giving iSeries customers the wrong message and those users might not take advantage of the power of SOA. "SOA has nothing to do with WebSphere per se; it's just that IBM is emphasizing using Java to implement it. In reality, SOA can just as easily be implemented using RPG and CGI--although there are probably more tools for parsing SML and WDSL (the XML language definition commonly used by SOA) in WebSphere. I think it is very important, though, that customers understand that SOA is an architecture that relies primarily upon HTTP and some XML coding standards--any kind of Web server (Java, IIS, Apache HTTP, etc.) and any kind of Web development tool (WebSmart, WebSphere, .NET, ColdFusion, PHP) can take advantage of this architecture."

Finally, Marcus Dee, president of looksoftware, believes that Web services and SOA are very relevant to the iSeries market and he expects that IBM's announcements will increase SOA awareness levels. looksoftware began supporting Web services two years back with Web services consumption support in its centric product, and soarchitect creates Web services from exiting iSeries applications. Dee's company will be testing the IBM ESB later this year.

Certainly, then, IBM is setting the stage, along with its chief competitors in both hardware and software, to make SOA a battlefield for new business. And Big Blue's commitment to win this was seems quite serious. As key players in the enterprise, iSeries boxes (they may be small, but they contain oh so many key applications!) will be caught up in the groundswell, whether the wish to be or not. Chances are they (both the applications and the businesses themselves) will be better off for it.

As Seagull's Addington says, "iSeries shops definitely understand the importance of SOA, and most of them are just beginning the journey toward service-oriented architecture. You can't go out and buy one--you have to get there step by step. The great thing about that journey is that it can deliver real business value along the way. Once you've committed to it, though, it's not exactly clear what your next step should be. IBM's commitment to provide a roadmap and to focus on tools and services for achieving SOA will be well received by IT departments that rely on IBM platforms."