Specific deliverables of the new IGS offerings include methodologies for establishing an SOA center of excellence, designed to foster best practices and architectural standards, plus a governance model that helps enforce them on new SOA development projects.
The governance model establishes a lifecycle for creating, managing, and retiring or repurposing services. It defines a life cycle for service development that leverages the services-oriented modeling architecture (SOMA) that IBM rolled out last year.
It also formalizes decision paths, outlining who is responsible for making and reviewing which decision impacting SOA rollouts, while setting checkpoints to track business alignment and effectiveness of new and existing services across different stages of the life cycle. IGS is offering templates for establishing these processes and procedures.
IGS is also offering a template for setting up an SOA Center of Excellence that includes representatives of IT, the business, plus SOA architects. Its responsibility is the usual grab bag of defining reference architectures, publishing patterns and best practices, conducting architectural reviews, and delivering architectural mentoring.
The roadmap assumes that these excellence centers would be set up incrementally rather than overnight, based on the organization’s experience and maturity in SOA rollout. Although similar in name only, IGS’s SOA maturity model has nothing to do with a rival proposal last week from Sonic, AmberPoint, Systinet, and Bearing Point.
IGS also took the opportunity to add to its SOA alliance program or partners, whose products it supports on engagements. With AmberPoint and SOA Software already on the list, IGS is adding Actional, which also provides web services management, and DataPower, which provides XML accelerator appliances.
Admittedly, these web services management and security products overlap with Tivoli, which recently announced a new spate of ITCAM offerings that manage composite applications composed as services. This is definitely a complex landscape and a quickly evolving marketplace, said Michael Liebow, vice president, SOA and Web Services during an analyst call. Although Tivoli is part of IBM, we are driven by customer requirements, he added.
For SOA Software, IBM Global Services is by far their largest consulting partner, having brought in several multi-million deals over the past year, according to executive vice president Roberto Medrano. Typically, IGS is the initial point of contact, reselling the SOA product and providing first level support.
They have jointly implemented projects such as an Extranet customer awards portal for a major financial services firm that triggers web services calls to business partners with each customer inquiry. Behind the scenes, the SOA Software package enforces rules regarding where the service is deployed and validates identities.
According to Medrano, Tivoli’s recently announced offerings have not yet been a distraction to joint sales. SOA Software has trained hundreds of IGS professionals, and expects the relationship to continue.
