IBM Extends BPM and SOA in WebSphere -- Visual Studio Magazine

IBM Extends BPM and SOA in WebSphere

By Jeffrey Schwartz
10/13/2009

IBM last week expanded its WebSphere middleware offering with a slew of new tools aimed at facilitating business process management and service oriented architectures.

At the heart of the new rollout is BPM BlueWorks, a set of cloud-based tools and content that IBM said will let developers learn how to build and deploy dynamic processes.

BPM BlueWorks enables modeling and simulation that ultimately is designed to help dev shops learn how to build and roll out capabilities that can respond to dynamic business processes, according to IBM.

"The inclusion of tools and services offers which are really about helping customers bring their business and IT people together is something that we find is very important for BPM initiatives to succeed and also about delivering value in smaller tactical projects," said Neil Ward-Dutton, research director and MWD Advisors in an email.

"These two areas are places where IBM’s competitors in the BPM and SOA spaces have historically really been able to perform very strongly," he added. "So it’s interesting to see IBM coming out of its comfort zone and being more aggressive regarding its 'specialist' competitors with these announcements."

To help extend these deployments, IBM also added several tools and platforms. Among them are WebSphere Business Events and Extreme Scale v7, designed to respond to heavy amounts of real-time events; WebSphere Registry and Repository, aimed at monitoring change management; BPM FastPath, tools designed to expedite BPM deployments, notably departments that require significant interaction by individuals; and WebSphere Industry Solutions, a set of tools focused on vertical markets.

The later consists of WebSphere Industry Content Packs V7, which provides vertical industry solution templates, WebSphere Transformation Extender V8.3 rapidly deploys industry transformation, which consists of EDI interchange packs for health care applications, and the WebSphere DataPower B2B Appliance XB60 V3.8, a platform for connecting trading partners adding new B2B messaging protocol support, IBM said.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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