IBM Services Help Customers Align Technology Investments to Business Goals

    IBM Global Services today announced new services to help companies maximize technology investments to support business goals. The new services create an end-to-end roadmap to help customers become on demand businesses by using a services-oriented architecture, a standards-based framework that integrates data across the enterprise as well as externally with customers, partners and suppliers.

    These new services will help customers with specific aspects of an SOA including planning, design, implementation and management. They execute the approach created by IBM’s Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture, a unique methodology that aligns an SOA to a customer’s business goals and directly ties business processes to underlying applications.

    These new asset-based services compliment traditional services by employing reusable, standardized components based on a combination of software code, intellectual property and best practices accumulated from engagements with thousands of customers in many industries. This new software-services hybrid model will speed implementation time, lower costs and deliver value back to the business faster. For example, the manually-intensive effort to understand and restructure data in legacy applications has been replaced by a set of assets built to the industry-specific business and technical standards and validated by experience with customers in the same industry.

    “Asset-based services will dramatically impact the way customers deploy Service-Oriented Architectures,” said Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services and SOA for IBM Global Services. “Many customers experience similar problems in deploying an SOA. Packaging best practices and software code generated from experience with thousands of customers into asset-based services offerings help us to reduce the risk and increase the value to customers faster.”

    The new IBM services are centered on industry specific solutions, which enables the quickest possible deployment of new technology for customers and leverage business process modeling techniques, such as Component Business Modeling. An industry specific approach defines common design and implementation techniques, providing an advantage to third party software vendors and other systems integrators by moving away from purely customized engagements. They also provide a governance dimension outlining how to achieve business goals. These new services include:

    —IBM Business Enablement Services for Service-Oriented Architecture identifies how an SOA can help meet customers’ business goals, infuse flexibility into IT assets, foster an alignment between business and IT and help avoid costly missteps by assuring that the technologies implemented will meet future needs.

    —IBM Design Services for Service-Oriented Architecture help customers create a specific plan and architectural design for an SOA. It identifies benefits and challenges of implementing an SOA and provides designs and specifications targeted to areas identified by IBM Business Enablement Services for Service-Oriented Architecture.

    —IBM Implementation Services for Service-Oriented Architecture builds and deploys targeted aspects of a customer’s SOA vision and roadmap.

    —IBM Management Services for Service-Oriented Architecture provides ongoing performance monitoring, maintenance and requirements verification to help assure the SOA is proactively managed for optimal business value.

    These four Services for SOA integrate with a customer’s underlying portfolio of custom and packaged enterprise applications through IBM’s new Application Value Optimization Services, which provide an end-to-end integrated solution designed to assess, transform and manage application portfolios on a continual basis. By transforming the IT environment to take advantage of the flexibility offered by SOA and Web services, Application Value Optimization Services links directly to a customer’s existing investment in large application portfolios, numbering into the thousands for many companies, to help lower maintenance costs and make resources available for new innovative services.

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