IBM: Major Force Behind SOA Movement

IBM has been a leader of the SOA movement for some time, involved in the drafting of standards and specifications, in educating both business and IT staff and executives, and in developing products and tools for implementing SOA. As might be expected, IBM’s deep involvement in SOA has resulted in their filing of scores of patents surrounding SOA technology.

In May, IBM hosted Impact 2007, a major SOA conference. In July, IBM released 150 SOA-related patents into the public domain. This follows a similar move by Microsoft last September to release patents on Web Services technology to the public. The IBM patents include topics like SOAP and WSDL, WS-Policy and Service Component Architecture (SCA). Both Microsoft and IBM are removing restrictions from the technologies that might otherwise lead developers to hesitate in adopting them.

During the Impact 2007 conference, IBM sponsored a survey on SOA that polled attendees of the conference.
One somewhat surprising finding of the IBM study was that the decision to adopt SOA technology isn’t come directly from IT, instead 65 percent of the respondents said that the initiative was driven by business managers and executives.

The results of the IBM study found that companies in 2006 increased by 10 to 20 percent of their budget for SOA, and 40 percent of the respondents said that 10 to 30 percent of their IT dollars are being spent on SOA.

To fuel the growth in SOA that is happening across so many companies, 60 percent of the respondents said that they’re in the process of retraining their employees, and 80 percent said that they plan to beef up skills in SOA. Most believe that to be successful, employee skill sets need to span elements of both business and IT.

IBM also announced six new professional services in the following areas: SOA Diagnostic, SOA Strategy, SOA Implementation Planning, Business Process Management Enabled by SOA, SOA Design Development and Integration, and SOA Management.

To guide companies in their SOA implementations, IBM has created industry-specific blueprint implementation methodologies. The blueprints contain perspectives that adopt to the different groups within the organization, one viewed from the business side perspective, one with an industry viewpoint, and another that focuses on the technical.

IBM has clearly embraced SOA and is betting on it in a big way. At this point it looks like it’s a smart move.