IBM announces a broad set of new product releases, services offerings and the SOA Sandbox

IBM announces a broad set of new product releases, service offerings and SOA Sandbox

On October 3, IBM made a broad announcement of new releases, products and services.

• WebSphere Process Server 6.1 is now available. This latest version is now running on WebSphere Application Server 6.1 and offers a new traceability of model artifacts and process flows between WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer.
• WebSphere Message Broker and MQ offer improved web service support
• WebSphere DataPower
• Tivoli Composite Application Manager
• IBM Information Server
• IBM Optim (a new Data Governance solution)
• WebSphere Registry & Repository
• WebSphere Business Monitor
• Rational Asset Manager
• Rational Tester for SOA Quality and Rational Performance Tester extension for SOA Quality

It released WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 that is designed to extend SOA by connecting external Web services, internal SOA services, and J2EE objects into highly-interactive Web application interfaces.

IBM also offers enhanced professional services supporting process integrity, including SOA Design, Development and Integration Services as well as management design and planning.In addition, IBM is releasing SOA configurations that provide best practices and step by step implementation guides to address key SOA implementation challenges

In addition, IBM released the SOA Sandbox which contains a large collection of technical papers organized around IBM perceived SOA Entry Points: reuse, connectivity, process, people and information. The Sandbox offers product trials. For instance this “lab” lets you use a trial environment of Rational Software Development Platform (SDP) to create an SOA service based on a Java class. This white paper teaches you how to use an ESB in the context of creating services from legacy services.

WPS datasheet does not seem to have been updated yet and IBM’s press release does not provide details about standard support such as SCA or SDO but, a while ago, Bobby Woolf gave us some insight about IBM’s approach to SCA support:

IBM is taking Tuscany, adding in proprietary extensions, wrapping that up as the feature pack, and adding it to WAS 6.1. Then the plan is for WPS 6.1 to be built on WAS 6.1 with this feature pack, but still be backwards compatible with WPS 6.0.x and its earlier, more proprietary implementations of SCA and SDO. So it looks like WPS 6.1, by being built on WAS 6.1 with this feature pack, will be built on Tuscany, which implements the OSOA specs. (Of course, nothing is definite until it's done.)

Recently Bobby published his latest book: "Exploring IBM SOA Technology and Practice" which is an introduction to IBM SOA product line. The book also presents at a high level the service lifecycle and governance processes that IBM recommends in its services offerings.