IBM Targets Problematic SOAs -- Visual Studio Magazine

IBM Targets Problematic SOAs

By Kurt Mackie
10/29/2007

Some organizations may not be happy with their service oriented architectures (SOAs). They may have "unhealthy" SOAs as a consequence of partnering with inexperienced system integrators. They may have proprietary SOA technology in the mix, and it may be difficult to scale operations.

IBM is proposing to address this bleak scenario with a new campaign. The company is offering services, consulting sessions and tools -- collectively referred to as the "IBM SOA Healthcheck" -- to help pump life into flagging SOAs.

The promise of SOA is that data and applications can be exposed as services, which then can be reused across the organization. SOA helps create a more agile IT to meet business objectives. However, implementing and maintaining an SOA requires expertise that IT departments may lack.

And businesses apparently do need help with SOAs.

IBM surveyed its own clients, finding that more than half have "25 percent or less of the skills needed to use SOA to meet long-term business goals," according to an announcement issued by the company.

Organizations can get help from IBM through its SOA health checks. The health checks examine SOAs in terms of application reuse, governance, security, middleware, workload and service management.

The company is also offering two different SOA workshops to organizations:

The SOA Applications and Services Healthcheck Workshop; and
The Infrastructure Healthcheck Workshop for SOA.

The first workshop provides assurance and SOA expansion advice over a two- to three-day period. The second workshop involves a high-level assessment of servers, storage, middleware solutions and systems management capabilities over a one- to three-day period.

For those just starting out with SOA, IBM offers packaged solutions. One that the company is promoting is called the Identity Aware Enterprise Service Bus. The package combines WebSphere ESB solutions with Tivoli security and identity management solutions. Security for the system is offered through IBM SOA Professional Services.

More details on IBM's SOA resources can be accessed here.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.