IBM Brings Quality Management to SOA Development

| March 16, 2007 | Application Infrastructure | Competitive Intelligence Report

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: High

Event Summary

March 13, 2007 -- IBM announced new software and services to help organizations ensure the quality of their service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA is a business strategy that enables a company to more closely align and reuse existing technology to achieve business goals. The new IBM SOA quality management portfolio, which includes Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere software as well as new technology services, will help improve the overall quality of technology in an SOA before it is deployed.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on IBM’s announcement of its SOA quality management portfolio, a bevy of software products and professional services focused on the problem of quality of service within SOA installations. With this multi-faceted announcement, IBM has strengthened its position within the SOA marketplace as a leader in both thought and action with the ability to combine disparate products quickly and leverage consulting expertise in the service of a specific goal.

• Vendor Importance: High to IBM, as the company needed to carry forward its SOA governance strategy announced early in 2006. This announcement’s focus on quality management brings an updated Tivoli Composite Application Manager, two new products, and two new professional services offerings to market in support of functional and performance testing for SOA services, placing IBM in a leadership position compared with SOA management rivals CA and HP.

• Market Impact: High on the SOA management market, which requires design, programming, and monitoring tools capable of applying accountability at both the front and back ends of the development cycle. IBM’s announced portfolio of offerings demonstrates the company’s ability to create internal synergies (crossing Tivoli, Rational, and WebSphere) and service market demands with a multi-pronged and flexible solution.

Recommended Competitor Actions

• CA should emphasize its already strong support for business process performance measurement with its Wily Customer Experience Manager, which boasts a more holistic approach to gathering both current and historical data on running services. Short of acquisition, HP must continue to partner aggressively with SOA suite providers (such as its recent agreement with BEA) to position its CA lifecycle, performance, and quality solutions as preferred offerings within SOA solutions by these vendors.

• HP should position IBM’s Rational testing tools as being limited in scope compared with LoadRunner, which can span a wider range of deployment environments and protocols and scale to meet a wide range of customer performance requirements.

• BPM pure play vendors such as HandySoft and Savvion should approach IBM (and its competitors) to form partnerships focused on merging BPM design and development workflows with robust compliance and SLA modeling and test capabilities.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• Existing IBM customers with SOA solutions should immediately evaluate the Rational Tester for SOA Quality and Rational Performance Tester Extension for SOA Quality. Customers should note that, to take full advantage of these products, they will also need to invest in WebSpere Business Modeler, Rational ClearCase, and Rational Method Composer.

• IBM customers already employing IBM’s Tivoli Composite Application Manager should consider upgrading, because the current release better supports SOA installations through dashboards designed specifically for WebSphere ESB and WebSphere Process Server. The new version now supports IBM’s DataPower appliance as well. In addition, customers not wishing to upgrade but wanting to utilize the new Rational tools can do so without limiting the scope of those tools.

• Potential customers should press IBM to provide discounts depending upon the number of products purchased from the company’s à la carte portfolio of SOA quality products. Customers should also press IBM to package its professional services offerings as a value.

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