The new facilities are in Beijing, China, and Pune, India, and will each house about 500 SOA specialists, IBM said in a statement. The Beijing center will handle services for the banking and government sectors, while the Pune site will focus on business services in the health care and insurance sectors.
IBM earlier this year said it would pour $1bn in SOA R&D efforts this year. Competitors such as Hewlett-Packard Co and Accenture Ltd have both opened dedicated SOA centers in the past four months. Accenture plans to spend $450m over three years on its SOA efforts, and HP said it is investing $500m in the same area.
Although a lot of enterprises have yet to transition to an actual SOA setting, plenty are working on pilots or doing SOA assessments of their business processes and IT environments. IBM said the market for SOA services is forecast to reach $160bn by 2008.
