IBM Plants New SOA Development Centers in India, China

If youre an IBM customer, theres a good chance the building blocks with which you will construct tomorrows enterprise applications will be made in China or India.

Continuing to expand its operations in those countries, IBM opened new centers in Beijing, China and Pune, India, dedicated to the development of SOA (service-oriented architecture) software.

The Pune center will focus on SOA software for the insurance and health care industries, while the Beijing center will work on SOA software for banking and state and local government customers.

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Each center has 500 employees, according to IBM officials, who declined to specify the amount of money invested in the centers.

However, the two new SOA Solutions Centers are encompassed in the $1 billion that IBM has said it is investing in SOA technology this year, according to IBM officials.

The SOA centers are the next part of the business solutions initiative announced by IBM in the spring of 2006.

In that initiative, IBM said it will make Web services components for applications intended for different industries in low-cost countries such as India and China.

The work will be coordinated by the IBM Global Business Solution Center, in Bangalore, India.

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By making available a large number of reusable application building blocks for various industries, IBM aims to help its customers adapt to changing business conditions by building new applications quickly.

“Its all about business model innovation—giving clients the ability to rapidly change business models by building applications with reusable software components,” said Sudhir Sastry, leader of the IBM SOA Solutions Center, in Pune.

Key to the initiative is IBMs WebSphere Business Services Fabric—based on technology IBM recently acquired when it purchased Webify Solutions, Sastry said.

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