• 
• 

Published on September 25, 2007

The firm is committed to assisting Asean countries with SOA technology with a set of SOA services including strategies, diagnostics, implementation planning, business process management, design and development and integration services.

Asean is one of the fastest growing regions in the adoption of IT, especially Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, while Vietnam and Thailand have the fastest growth in the region.

Dan Power, worldwide SOA vice president at IBM, said Asean is one of the highlight SOA markets for the firm.

The company has invested over US$1 billion (Bt34 billion) a year in SOA to build not only skilled SOA consultants and create over 300 SOA-related patents, but also to increase the number of SOA business partners with more than 3,600 partners and more than 4,500 clients around the world in the past three years.

"These resources will be utilised to encourage clients in Asean to benefit from SOA. IBM's targeted sectors for SOA include financial, insurance, government, healthcare, banking, retail, telecommunications and industrial sectors. In Asean the telecommunications sector is particularly significant," said Power.

Power said that according to Winter Green Research in April, IBM had about 53 per cent of the worldwide SOA market last year.

This figure was based on SOA engines and components, and IBM aimed to keep the lead.

There are five entry points which represent the reasons customers require SOA - collaboration, communication, reuse, information services and business models.

The beauty of SOA is that it reduces integration expenses, increases asset reuse, reduces risk and increases business agility. These four core benefits actually offer returns at many different levels of an organisation, depending on which set of business problems the company is applying SOA to.

Jadesada Kraisingkorn, country manager of the software group at IBM Thailand, said clients in Thailand mostly start with SOA for collaboration and reuse.

In Thailand, the three sectors with the most potential to adopt SOA are financial, telecommunications and government. In the past few years IBM Thailand has developed SOA clients such as Thai Military Bank, Bank of Ayudhaya, True and the Comptroller General's Department.

"Most of them started SOA with the purposes of collaboration and reuse. In Thailand, the three potential entry points for customers are collaboration, reuse and connectivity," said Jedesada.

Even though the overall market is slow due to the political situation, in the second half of this year SOA will be one of the key factors in business and government IT spending.

"We hope to have up to 10 SOA clients in Thailand this year. There are many target customers interested in SOA adoption such as Siam Cement Group, the Customs Department, Government Saving Bank, Cat Telecom, Robinson, 7-Eleven and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," said Jedesada.

IBM has promoted SOA in the country since late 2005. Thailand has solid target customers, mostly enterprises that have complex systems and require building blocks that they can reuse. The company has more than 10 skilled SOA business partners in Thailand.

"IBM is the leader in SOA and we have invested a lot in it. We have many SOA-related products that can help our customers implement their IT infrastructure with innovative architecture easier and faster," said Jedesada.

Boonson Jenchaimahakoon, executive vice president for technology at Government Saving Bank, said the bank plans to invest Bt20 million in SOA this year with the launch of an SOA pilot project in the middle of next year. The bank will start SOA at the front-end system with the aim of developing and introducing a range of new services for customers.

"We look at SOA in areas of connectivity and reuse. We hope SOA will allow us to develop and deliver new types of services with better time to market and better returns on the investment. We will deploy SOA to serve the front-end system, at 1,000 ATM machines and at 600 branches which require updated services often," said Boonson.

Vites Techangam, senior executive vice president of Krung Thai Computer Services, said SOA is a must for businesses, especially financial and banking firms which have complex systems, as it increases performance and capability while reducing costs and time in development and deployment. The company is also looking to SOA but has not yet decided on its SOA vendors.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

Singapore