After IMPACT 2007 in Orlando, Java Developer's Journal had the opportunity to talk with Sandy Carter about IBM's new SOA announcements at the event, as she is responsible for driving IBM's cross-company, worldwide SOA marketing initiatives.

JDJ: Please outline for us the new SOA roadmaps that IBM announced at the recent IMPACT event in Orlando. What do they contain? Are they targeted at vertical markets, and, if so, how else are they targeted?

Sandy Carter: IBM has just announced eight new industry-specific SOA Roadmaps spanning six industries. Each of the SOA roadmaps contains a business blueprint, which helps customers map the business side of an SOA strategy, and an industry-specific framework, which includes core technology used to execute the business blueprint. The new SOA Roadmaps focus on critical business process areas within a given industry. Some examples include online booking for the insurance industry, member enrollment and benefits/eligibility for health care, payments for banking, personal shopping for retail, service provisioning and service delivery for telecommunications, and supply chain collaboration for industrial.

The business blueprints begin with detailed research that outlines industry challenges and how those industries can benefit from SOA. Each piece of research examines specific business scenarios, describing how those processes are typically executed today and how they could be improved with SOA. The business blueprint also recommends an SOA entry point to make it easier for businesses to know the best place to start to deliver the most immediate business benefits. IBM's SOA entry points make it easier for customers to approach and initiate SOA projects. The three business entry points are people, process, and information. The two technical entry points are connectivity and reuse.

Complementing these offerings, IBM also recently announced the IBM SOA Industry Frameworks. These frameworks include technology from IBM and IBM Business Partners to help use SOAs. They provide customers with reusable, industry-specific software modules called business services that are based on the WebSphere Business Services Fabric. These modules perform individual tasks tailored to the industry's users, policies, and methods. New SOA Industry Frameworks are specific to the banking, health care, telecom, retail, and insurance industries to add to the first framework for Product Lifecycle Management, which was announced late last year. Additional frameworks will follow later this year.

JDJ: IBM also announced six new SOA Professional Services. Can you provide an overview on each of these?

Carter: IBM's six new SOA professional services are focused on SOA Diagnostic, SOA Strategy, SOA Implementation Planning, Business Process Management Enabled by SOA, SOA Design Development and Integration, and SOA Management. New capabilities include infrastructure and strategy workshops for SOA Strategy professional services, Web application and portal infrastructure services for SOA Design, Development and Integration, and a new testing center of excellence for SOA management.

JDJ: IMPACT had a flurry of activity regarding SOA. Is this in response to general projections of growth for SOA, customer input, the competitive landscape, or all three?

Carter: IBM's activity around SOA has been driven by strong customer demand. SOA has been a growth engine for IBM as well as our customers because it gives companies the much-needed flexibility to focus on achieving business results without being hindered by the constructs of established infrastructures. IBM's competitive differentiation is in its ability to address business challenges using the right balance of business and technical skills along with an unmatched, multi-pronged approach to meeting customers' needs.

JDJ: What sort of time frame or range of time frames do you typically see with SOA, from original outline to deployment? What sort of preference have you seen for companies to do a pilot project versus, say, a complete departmental SOA design and deployment?

Carter: The time frames vary depending on the organization's needs and the alignment of business and IT. Working with more than 4,500 customers worldwide on their SOA strategy, we recommend that companies first begin with one of the five SOA entry points. These entry points are people, process, information, connectivity, and reuse. In addition, we recommend forming a cross-company team of business and IT leaders so that the SOA strategy is mapped out and agreed upon before deployment.

JDJ: What are the most common questions that you receive from customers who are just setting sail along the SOA waters? What are the most common questions you receive from customers who have deployed a SOA and are now in the process of maintaining it or expanding it?

Carter: The five most common questions from customers who are beginning their SOA journey are usually:

• Can I still use my existing software and hardware?
• Where do I begin with SOA?
• Is SOA for large companies only?
• How do I gain the much-needed SOA skills?
• How do I prove the value of SOA to the executives in my organization?

First, SOA is specifically designed to protect existing IT investments in software and hardware. The most successful SOA deployments are found at those companies that begin with a view of SOA as a long-term business strategy. These companies approach SOA incrementally, through one of the five entry points cited above, and continuously measure and monitor its success at every step along the way.

Interestingly, in addition to large organizations, we're seeing more and more companies in the small- to medium-sized business market deploying SOA as a way to build a more flexible environment that makes the most use of technology and staff skills.

For those companies that are expanding their SOA, the questions are usually about, "how do I document and share my business processes?" To do this, it's important that the SOA initiative includes a strong governance strategy to make sure that its services can be easily managed, monitored, and reused while ensuring only best practices are shared.

In terms of developing skills, it's clear that the industry is facing a serious SOA IT skills shortage. In fact, a recent study found that 56 percent of IBM customers cited lack of skills, mainly individuals with a blending of IT technical understanding and business process acumen, as the leading inhibitor to SOA.

To address the SOA skills shortage, IBM recently announced new tools and certification programs to help organizations develop teams of individuals with so-called "T-shaped" skills, which encompass both deep business skills, represented by the horizontal line of the "T," and technical understanding, represented by the vertical line.

The new skills-centric offerings include an interactive SOA game called Innov8, which is a Business Process Management (BPM) Simulator. Innov8 is an interactive, 3D educational game simulator designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization. This type of serious gaming - simulations that have the look and feel of a game but correspond to non-game events or processes such as business operations - has emerged as a successful method to retrain or develop new skills. Of note, this simulator is the result of the annual IBM SOA case study competition among graduate students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. The game, which is played with a joy stick, is based on advanced, commercial gaming technologies and allows players to visualize how an SOA affects different parts of the organization. Together, users can literally see business processes, identify bottlenecks, and explore "what if" scenarios before the SOA is deployed. In addition, IBM has introduced "IBM TV: Impact Channel," an online portal that contains Webcasts, podcasts, demos, white papers, and other resources targeted to business and IT professionals as well as those looking to develop T-shaped skills.

Further, IBM has enhanced its SOA certification and education programs with new, self-paced and instructor-led courses conducted online and in classrooms. With more than 218 SOA-based courses for every level in an organization, IBM's SOA curricula provide the roadmap to master the most highly sought-after SOA industry skills. IBM also continues to foster relationships with higher education institutions and is working with hundreds of colleges and universities around the world on SOA curricula.

IBM recognizes that a successful SOA strategy requires both IT and business executives to collectively map out goals and illustrate the value of the SOA project. To this end, IBM offers free, online assessment tools to help executives at companies of all sizes determine their organization's business and IT needs. For example, IBM's SOA Business Analyzer helps an organization identify its greatest assets and opportunities that are ripe for an SOA project.

Also, the IBM BPM with SOA ROI Assessment Tools helps organizations assess their Business Process Management (BPM) readiness through 10 simple questions. It then delivers a BPM score, assesses an organization's position to realize benefits from BPM, and provides recommended next steps. Through this assessment, both IT and business executives can better understand the business value of an SOA strategy.