IBM Tivoli User Community

EXECUTIVE CORNER

Sandy Carter Sandy Carter
Vice President of SOA and WebSphere across IBM

Building a better, smarter SOA

Service oriented architecture, or SOA, is an exciting new frontier. It offers a highly flexible, modern IT infrastructure that easily adapts to changing business conditions – namely by letting customers reuse their business services without extensive programming.

IBM has taken the notion of SOA one step further with our recent launch of the Smart SOA campaign. Smart SOA isn’t a brand or a product that you buy. Rather, it consists of a set of defining principals and best practices that come from the experiences of more than 5,700 of our customers who have deployed SOA solutions.

By harnessing and sharing this collective insight, we’re working to help you more easily navigate every stage and entry point of the SOA continuum.

Why Smart SOA?
We developed Smart SOA to address the needs of customers, who occasionally hit stumbling blocks when attempting to take SOA projects to higher levels. For example, they may have launched a pilot or proof of concept, but weren’t able to scale it into production. Others have found that pursuing SOA projects on a less formal, more scattered basis can dramatically reduce its effectiveness.

We have assembled information – a set of approaches – that worked best for our most successful SOA customers. These Smart SOA approaches focus on bringing simplicity and robustness to every project, eliminating unnecessary complexity and building a strong foundation for future growth – whether you’re working on a relatively simple foundational project, or the most sophisticated, enterprise-wide initiative.

To that end, we’ve also introduced some SOA configurations to help our customers in key areas, such as reusing services, SOA security, for System z applications and around packaged applications, such as SAP and Oracle.

Whether you’re a System z mainframe or distributed computing customer, these guidelines and configurations can help you improve the IT and business value of SOA projects.

Gain the most IT and business value from SOA
How do you actually gain the knowledge and insight offered by Smart SOA?

Start by accessing or downloading the flash tutorial that walks you through the concept of Smart SOA. You can also find an executive summary and a white paper at the same site that outlines Smart SOA at a high level.

Then add the Smart SOA widget to your desktop to receive the most up-to-date information on the topic.

Also check out our SOA Sandbox. This Web feature allows you to improve your SOA skills and reduce deployment times through practical, hands-on experience with the IBM SOA entry points. Users can take advantage of full-version software trials and try online hosted environments at no cost. You’ll also gain access to online demos, best practices and quick-start guides.

If you’ve already deployed an SOA project or are planning one, we offer a SOA Healthcheck. The initiative provides software and services, specialized diagnostics and triage to help maximize SOA performance and identify system issues that may hinder performance.

The Healthcheck covers six common areas that impact SOA success, including application reuse, governance, workload and service management, security and middleware. To learn more, watch this presentation.

For more in-depth or specific consultation on your project, you can also contact our services teams, including IBM Global Technology Services and Global Business Services.

I’m thrilled to pass on these valuable practices and guidelines. If you’ve already dived into SOA, or are just considering various entry points, Smart SOA can help you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes, while gaining the full IT and business value of your investments.

For more information:
Start here: Simple to advanced Smart SOA