A ladder up from

legacy environments"> Another service IBM will offer is Application Renovation and Integration for Service Oriented Architecture, which is for customers who want to expand their legacy systems into SOA environments. The fourth new service, Component Business Modeling, enables customers to break down their business according to the processes involved in running it, Cosby said.

The Armonk, N.Y., company is adding to its services capabilities by increasing the number of people who are knowledgeable about SOAs and Web services. "We have about 15,000 experts in Global Services who are well-skilled and knowledgeable about Web services," Cosby said. "And well be training another 35,000." IBM will hold an event next month in Toronto to get its customers more informed about SOAs, he said.

In addition to the services, IBM will introduce new products to support SOAs. The WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation product features native support for BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and enables customers to build and integrate applications in SOAs, Cosby said.

WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation supports both Common Event Infrastructure and Java Developers Kit 1.4, and its tools are based on the Eclipse open-source development framework.

In addition, IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition 5.1, which will be released at the same time, will enable developers to develop and deploy BPEL applications visually, Cosby said.

IBMs SOA play Services offerings IBM Assessments for Service Oriented Architectures Strategy and Planning for Service Oriented Architecture Application Renovation and Integration for Service Oriented Architecture Component Business Modeling Product offerings WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition 5.1

"IBMs solution is evolving with this announcement toward a more integrated platform based on a single run-time stack built on J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] and Web services standards," said Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., of Cambridge, Mass. "This is an important step along the road to unify the IBM solution onto that stack, which will culminate with its complete unification on the WebSphere stack about a year from now. In the meantime, this release places a greater proportion of IBMs solution on that unified platform."

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