But IBM’s emphasis, here at the Impact 2007 conference in Orlando, was on a strategy for beefing up vertical industry SOA frameworks, because, according to IBM, the business side is increasingly calling the shots in IT technology decisions.

On the product front, IBM announced that content management provider FileNet, which it acquired last October, will get several new levels of integration by September.

On the roadmap, it will add design time integration with WebSphere Business modeler, meaning that a model composed using the WebSphere tool can be manipulated on FileNet P8, its more recent Java product line.

Additionally, WebSphere Business Modeler will also be able to accept common events from FileNet P8, and FileNet process models will be storable in WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR).

In each case, IBM will still support use of FileNet p* tools, but is promoting the WebSphere model designer and repository as the common engines if you want to do real time, dynamic process management.

IBM also announced a new product, Rational Asset Manager, providing a registry of design assets that would complement WSRR.

Other product announcements included the WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50, which now supports direct database connectivity to IBM DB2 plus WebSphere Transformation Extender Design Studio, providing common data transformation tooling across IBM’s ESB.

And IBM made several incremental announcements adding new data sources for WebSphere’s BAM, plus new integration between WSRR with Tivoli ITCAM, which tracks the operations side of SOA service levels.

But the product announcements were incidental to the overall theme for, for SOA to deliver on its promise, offerings must be verticalized.

The rationale is that few IT organizations have the resources, budgets, or desire to start from scratch and would at least like to benefit from a degree of packaged functionality, but without the functional straightjackets provided by SAP, Oracle et al.

[SOA] frees up business processes that have been bounded up by applications, remarked Steve Mills, head of IBM Software Group.

IBM views BPM (business process management) as the glue that makes it all happen, with SOA being the piece that makes BPM dynamic. And it views verticalizing as the way to get SOA off the ground and make it a business, rather than an IT project.

Consequently, the news wasn’t heavy on new announcements here. In most cases, IBM already had assets that it is now upgrading, either to serve more processes in more industries, or to deepen the functional reach of any specific framework.

The vertical offerings are on several levels, including blueprints that describe a business scenario, such as order to cash in manufacturing. As an introductory document, the blueprints describe the business scenario as it exists in most companies today, how it could be improved using SOA, and where the entry point for SOA might be.

The next level is the SOA Industry Frameworks, which include technology from IBM and its business partners. They are designed to provide actual services for specific processes in specific industries, which could be the SOA equivalent of starter applications. The actual frameworks are product as part of WebSphere Business Fabric, the piece that came to IBM through the Webify acquisition last year.

Last year, IBM announced a framework for Product Lifecycle Management. This week, it announced new frameworks covering processes in banking, healthcare, telecom, retail, and insurance industries.

Rounding out the announcements, IBM added some new professional services to its SOA catalog, including a diagnostic offering that uses IBM’s SOA Maturity Model to provide a report card on where your company is on the road to SOA.

Our View

In many ways, the verticalization of SOA is like deja vu all over again (that’s a sports expression made by a former New York Yankees baseball star who was known for malapropisms). That’s because, with services, you can not just free up processes that are based in application silos, but also take better advantage of business process outsourcing.

That of course sparks other debates, but if you assume, like many electronics manufacturers, that outsourcing warranty repair and logistics to UPS is a good thing, then the fact is, you’re returning to a market of ‘shared services’ that predated the rise of packaged software in the 1980s.

And as you verticalize these offerings further, you wind up with service packages that become in essence, applications. That’s because, the rationale for packaged enterprise applications and vertical services frameworks are much the same: IT departments don’t want to reinvent the wheel, if today, nobody wants to custom write a new ERP system, then why custom write an order-to-cash service tomorrow?

Another interesting point that came out of today’s discussions was IBM’s prediction that the Business Architect would become the person who, in the future, would become pivotal to SOA initiatives. It reflects the fact that increasingly, business, not IT, is calling the technology shots, and that business units are beefing up their own IT knowledge and capabilities, rather than relying on IT to carry it out for them. (Actually, we recall that Gartner Group several years ago spoke of the Business process Analyst as becoming the position to watch.)

Yet at the same time, IBM says that successful SOA also occurs only when you have strong IT organizations that can promote and enforce architectural standards. So at this point, we get the sense that IBM is still honing, not only its message, but its assessment as to who will really become the focal point for SOA engagements.