New opportunities with SOA

DAVID POOLE: Hello, this is David Poole with IBM’s On Demand Business team, and I’m here with...

SANDY CARTER: Sandy Carter. I’m a Vice President for Marketing, Strategy and Channels for the WebSphere® brand at IBM.

DAVID POOLE: And we’re going to talk about service-oriented architecture and a new announcement that IBM recently made. Sandy, can you tell us a little about that?

SANDY CARTER: Sure. I’m really excited about this announcement around service orientation and service-oriented architecture. As you know, service-oriented architecture starts at the business process level. So I’m thrilled to announce a new set of products around business process management. And these products are the WebSphere Business Process Server, the WebSphere Business Modeler, the WebSphere Integration Developer, and WebSphere Business Monitor. Now, it’s this set of products that help to take you from modeling your process to assembling your process with reuse as its core, so reusing services that you have. Also, taking a look at integrating that into your current environment, and then managing that securely and also monitoring it with business results.

It is a complete end-to-end story, end-to-end life cycle, again, with a closed-loop process, the first of its kind in the industry, really bridging the gap between that business analyst and that IR architect or developer out there in the marketplace. So it’s a very powerful announcement, probably one of the biggest announcements that WebSphere has had in, oh, I’d say five-plus years.

DAVID POOLE: Can you talk a little about the evolution of SOA, and how things are different now? This new announcement indicates a lot of new technology that can enable businesses to develop service-oriented architecture.

SANDY CARTER: We keep using the “service” word. A service is simply a business task, and service orientation is simply putting together many business tasks to form your business.

Service-oriented architecture is simply the architecture, or the foundation, or the framework from IT, the mirror image of business in an IT infrastructure. So if you take a look at some of the changes in the evolution, many of the promises of service-oriented architecture, or SOA, around reuse and flexibility have been heard before. However, we now know that we can take these to the next level, the next stage of integration. We now have standards in place. They’ve been adopted by IBM and Microsoft. We now have the business and IT working together. And we now have the technology lined up, the technology and the standards lined up, a level of abstraction. And the level we can go to in a technology is now there so we can get this extreme flexibility and reuse.

So think about service-oriented architecture and service orientation as the next stage in your kind of integration journey, EAI to SOA. And this is a journey. It’s not going to stop with service-oriented architecture. If you take a look at the Gartner statistics, they say that service-oriented architecture will be used by 80 percent of the companies by 2008. So it’s something that’s going to be around and something that your competitors are looking at and using today.

DAVID POOLE: Now does this mean that the CEO and the CIO are going to have to play nice in the sandbox together?

SANDY CARTER: So service-oriented architecture does bridge the chasm between business and IT. It creates a common language around process, so that the business and IT can come together and communicate, and really drive the business as a team.

Many of the other announcements that we’ve made, around the SOA Industry Accelerators, also further emphasize that teaming, or that SOA is a team sport. Our Industry Accelerators are packaged best practices, and you know how – that are leveraging our industry expertise. So we’ve announced a set of accelerators, that will be delivered in the fourth quarter around a whole set of industries to help you get started faster as a customer around your service-oriented architecture.

DAVID POOLE: Now, if I was an executive, and said, “Well, I don’t think service-oriented architecture really applies to me,” what would you tell me?

SANDY CARTER: Well, I would say that you’re probably not thinking right about service-oriented architecture. Because whether you’re a big customer or a small customer, I believe that service orientation and service-oriented architecture is for you. It’s simply a way of looking at your business as a set of business tasks. So if you’re a company who wants to grow, the way that you grow is that you have flexible IT to allow you to change the business quickly and respond to the market.

If you’re a company who is sitting out there and who wants to reduce your cost, how do you do that? Well, you can do that by reusing the assets that you have. And if you’re a customer who’s sitting out there and saying, “I really need to drive my business for globalization going forth,” well that’s all about service-oriented architecture. So whether you’re big or you’re small, I really challenge you to take a look at service orientation and service-oriented architecture. I mean, every industry, everybody that I talk to, is taking a look at this. And in fact, if you look at our SOA summits, it’s sold out around the world; already 2,500 customers have come to figure out what their first step is in service orientation.

DAVID POOLE: Sandy Carter, thank you very much.