IBM Bolsters its SOA Leadership With the Launch of New Offerings to Help Enterprises Weather the Turbulent Economic Storm

IBM Thailand announced new solutions under the Smart Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service Management concept in order to help companies drive alignment of business and IT, better cost efficiency & compliance, and improve service delivery, thus be able to successfully weather the current economic storm.

In today's economic environment, the only constant is change. It takes a dynamic infrastructure to allow an organization to adapt quickly.  To be dynamic means to focus continually on infrastructure efficiency and reducing costs, responsiveness to the business and improving service, and effectively managing risk to ensure security, scalability and availability. This is important as the lack of agility, inflexible systems, outdated delivery models, increasing security and compliance concerns and high fixed-cost infrastructure inhibit innovation, competitiveness and growth. IT complexity drives significant business risk. In addition, according to IBM, businesses waste 5.3 hours per employee per day due to inefficient processes. Two-thirds of employees believe there are colleagues who can help them do their jobs better, but don't know how to find them. Moreover, 42 percent of people are forced to make decisions with the wrong information at least once per week, while 91 percent of CEOs surveyed by IBM last year said they needed to restructure the way their organizations work. 

Today's announcement reinforces IBM's commitment and investment in SOA. With more than 8,000 customers and 7,400 Business Partners around the world, IBM continues to build on its SOA market leadership. In fact, according to recent study by industry analyst Wintergreen, IBM holds 70 percent of the worldwide SOA market, a six percent increase over last year. Also in Asia Pacific region, based on the report released by another IT analyst, Springboard Research, last year, IBM is also the leader in SOA in the region in terms of market perception and market share with 42% and 46% share respectively. Moreover, IBM SOA solutions are also very well received by clients in wide range of industries with over 275 SOA projects already been implemented across the region.*

"Under the current economic situation and tremendous challenges, many companies adopt similar approach which is to reduce cost at every possible way they can. In addition, they also cannot avoid the need to drive more productivity, effectively manage risks and compliance and also improve their service delivery in order to become more competitive. With this requirement in place, the key is to interconnect all of their business and IT assets to become more dynamic in order to transform service delivery and achieve superior business outcomes" said Ms. Jadesada Kraisingkorn, Country Manager, Software Group, IBM Thailand Co., Ltd. "With our wide range of solutions under the concept of Smart SOA and Service Management announced today, IBM is, once again, drawing on our expertise, leading edge technology and SOA leadership to help our clients weather the current economic storm. We are strongly confident that our new solutions would lay a foundation for breakthrough productivity, accelerated value creation and increased velocity needed for our clients and help them achieve their ultimate business objectives" added Ms. Jadesada.

The new solutions launched under Smart SOA and Service Management concept today address 3 key business requirements which are to reduce cost, manage risk and improve service. The solutions are as follows:

Reduce Cost

• 'Green' solution aimed to address data center's energy efficiency. The solution includes virtualization technology and a wide range of Tivoli software which are designed to drive more energy efficiency, better productivity and more cost savings.

• WebSphere group of software. The solution which helps manage the company's IT system and software applications. It helps track, monitor, and control business process and enable users to identify problems in the early stage so that they would be able to solve them before it spreads to a larger scale.

Manage Risk

• ILOG software. The software tools designed to help management, system analysts, and programmers make automated decisions. It is customizable and can help users track archival records in order to eliminate and minimize system errors.

• WebSphere Software which helps manage IT security and compliance for the enterprises such as managing User Life Cycle for wide range of applications deployed within the company, Single Sign-On capability which provides users the ability to do one log-on and be able to access all their applications, and Log Management which centralizes and manages logs from all applications and appliances deployed across the enterprise.

• Data Power - an SOA appliances which are designed to enhance efficiency in XML and web service processing and also provides better security protection from intrusion via company's web services.

• Rational group of software. The solution designed to increase system stability and security for company's software web applications.

Improve Service

• WebSphere Business Process Management. The group of software which are designed to enhance efficiency in managing business process. It helps users understand, specify, improve, and adhere to defined business process so that they would be able to analyze, track status and bring the analyzed data to improve business process within the organization.

• Tivoli group of software. The solution designed to help monitor the company's IT infrastructure such as servers, network, database, transactions and applications. Then it would consolidate the record collected from IT infrastructure across the enterprise and displayed them on the Central Dashboard. This would help users identify the cause of the problem and enable them to improve company's IT services effectively.