IBM Continues Its SOA JuggernautIBM Continues Its SOA Juggernaut

Not content to rest easily on the laurels its major announcement two weeks ago that reorganized its software and services portfolio around SOAs, this week IBM added a little more muscle to its services-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative by signing up two new partners and broadening its portfolio with new technical capabilities.

IBM Global Services (IGS) plans to integrate and sell Actional's Looking Glass and SOAPstation products, which have the ability to transform heterogeneous environments and services beyond those of SOAP and XML. IGS will also resell DataPower's line of policy-based management functions for legacy and XML transaction flows.Interestingly, although IBM emphasized in the announcement that the market was hungry for management capabilities, analysts were less sure of the importance of that functionality. With most companies--even the larger ones--still at the proof-of-concept stage, analysts think most users do not necessarily need industrial-strength management capabilities yet.

In other SOA news of note, Oracle announced the Oracle Portlet Factory development tool designed to help organizations integrate and interact with data pulled from disparate business applications via a portal. Built using technology licensed from Bowstreet, Oracle Portal and Oracle Portlet Factory are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, and enable customers to build composite applications that interact with data from SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and Oracle e-business suite applications.

Finally, we had an excellent how-to feature on Visual Studio 2005, which examines all the ways that the latest version of Microsoft's development tools aid developer productivity in the face of the increasing complexity of the .Net framework and the tool's diverse feature set.