IBM painted the announcements as being around all the points where an SOA project might be instigated: information, people, processes, connectivity, and reuse. According to one analyst, the conference call announcing the products was packed with more news than he had ever heard at one sitting.

But there was no single killer product announcement. Instead, the message was focused on putting perspective on a series of IBM releases across product lines providing a more practical view of where to start on SOA and how to get business benefit.

Until now, said Robert Leblanc, IBM’s general manager of the WebSphere business, much of the SOA product releases have been angled toward IT, rather than the business side.

With this spate of announcements, IBM was aiming its message at SMB (small-midsize business), and provided several customer examples to show that you don’t have to be the size of Wal-Mart or Verizon to benefit from SOA.

It produced spokespeople from Harley Davidson, the Pep Boys auto parts retail chain, and the Delaware Electric Power Cooperative to prove the point that SOA provides a less disruptive, lower cost alternative for SMBs to integrate key processes.

Consequently, although the scope of the announcement was broad enough to include a number of new or enhanced products, for the most part, the message was, here is how to make sense of what we’ve actually released over the past few months.

For instance, the highlight of the information sharing portion of the announcement was over WebSphere Information Server, a meta data server that came as part of the Ascential acquisition’s code-named Hawk product; and DB2 Viper, a hybrid database that handles relational and XML data.

Among the new announcements, IBM will release a new registry and repository that replaces its previous registry offering. The new product, which will include UDDI 3 compliant registry for run time plus a broader repository for design time, is still in customer beta and won’t be out until late summer or early fall.

Other new product announcements included several enhancements to WebSphere Process Server, which now adds zSeries support, some new tools for building composite SOA applications, various enhancements for making process integration real-time, and integration with WebSphere Content Server.

Additionally, WebSphere ESB adds new capabilities to expose non-SOA sources as services, while adding a plug-in for the DataStage TX providing the means to expose classic EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) messages as services.

And if you want to continue relying on an application server instead of an ESB for deploying services, WebSphere Application Server has added support for some of the newest web services standards, such as WS-ReliableMessaging (WS-RM).

On the people side, IBM announced WebSphere Portal 6 (see Computergram, April 3, 2006), which adds some application templates for quick start projects, and it also announced that IBM Global Services (IGS) is ramping up SOA services with an army of nearly 90,000 trained consultants.

In many ways, this announcement was something of a grab bag, in that it involved spotlighting dozens of products that happen to support SOA as part of their overall function, such as the Tivoli Configuration and Change Management Database (CCMDB), which reflects the recent Micromuse acquisition.

IBM was vague regarding the availability of new products or enhancements announced. So in a sense, the mega-announcement was a non-event.

Of course, rivals like Sun say that IBM’s offerings are hopelessly costly and complex, with the fact that they must announce integrations proving that point. IBM’s response is that, while it has numerous offerings, even the narrowest of enhancements (such as adding zSeries interfaces here and there) all work toward a common goal of making SOA doable.