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IBMs Global Services division Thursday announced the formation of a management practice to help customers implement service-oriented architectures.
The IBM SOA Management Practice is targeted at customers who need help managing Web services and building out infrastructure as they scale to enterprise SOAs, according to the company.
IBM officials said the new practice is based on expertise IBM has gained over the past year helping customers design SOAs.
The Armonk, N.Y., systems giant has more than 35,000 consultants trained in the intricacies of SOA, said Bob Sutor, director of WebSphere software at IBM. In addition, IBM said it plans to pull more than $100 million in revenue from SOA efforts over the next year.
“Thats quite substantial and a major effort on their part,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass. “I think in general, were seeing the market for SOA products and services mature considerably, and weve seen both the size, scope, and cost of these engagements go up considerably. By all counts, hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent this year and next on SOA engagements, and IBM is poised to capture a large part of those deals.”
The SOA Management Practice will involve Tivoli management software and technology from Digital Evolution Inc., of Santa Monica, Calif.
Among the management services that will be included in the practice are: security, including authentication and authorization, and support for Web services security specifications; monitoring; performance, to monitor service throughput and capacity in an SOA; business performance management; integration broker support, for service prioritization, failover, load balancing, dynamic routing, and data, protocol and XML transformation, scheduling and metering, and the ability to feed metrics into a billing system; catalog support, for discovery and integration; and extensibility, including development tools for Web service management.
“Theres a good sign here that SOA management is coming into the mainstream,” Schmelzer said. “IBM believes that they can generate significant revenue from that service source this year. Also, were seeing rapid growth from professional services firms for SOA engagements. In fact, we think the rate of growth for services firms for SOA will be much higher than the rate of growth of SOA software vendors in 2005.”