IBM Expands SOA Management Practice

IGS (IBM Global Services) plans to announce on Thursday the expansion of its SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Management Practice to include two new partners and new capabilities.

Actional Corp. and DataPower Technology Inc. will join the IGS SOA Management Practice, joining existing partners AmberPoint and SOA Software, IBM Corp. officials said.

IBM, based in Armonk, NY, launched its IBM Global Services SOA Management Practice late last year to help customers deploy SOA-based solutions. To date, IGS has helped dozens of customers move SOAs into production, the company said.

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Meanwhile, IGS officials said a key focus of its SOA Management Practice is to create and maintain SOA management assets, including software code, best practices and intellectually property to be delivered through the companys WebSphere-based CSDP (Common Services Delivery Platform).

"We see the use of Service Oriented Architectures among customers is evolving rapidly from technology evaluation into production deployment," said Michael Liebow, vice president, SOA and Web Services, IBM Global Services in a statement. "Customers greatest concern now as they expand from pilot projects to enterprise wide SOA deployment is Management and Governance."

The expanded SOA Management Practice will complement the companys recently announced IBM Global Services SOA Governance capability, IGS officials said.

Tom Ryan, CEO of Actional, in a statement, said: "Leveraging leading technology, we enable customers to achieve the end-to-end transaction visibility required for security, performance, web services management and SLA adherence.

"Our runtime governance solution completes the governance lifecycle by measuring, enforcing and auditing governance policies and rules in production and runtime environments."

Meanwhile, DataPower announced its part of the IBM Global Services SOA Management Practice under an agreement by IBM to resell DataPowers AON (application-oriented network) devices.

Under the terms of this reseller agreement, IGS will be able to provide its customers with DataPowers Web services solutions as part of working with the practice.

IGS also will provide 7x24x4-hour on-site support, which means that DataPower customers and joint DataPower/IBM customers can get enhanced support including 4-hour hardware replacement.

"By teaming up with IBM Global Services, we are able to transform our customers businesses even faster," said Jim Ricotta, CEO and President at DataPower in a statement.

"We share a vision of a mature approach to SOA, which goes beyond single, stove-piped products or technology-first thinking, to focus instead on the business drivers and the agile network."

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