Survey says IBM leader in web services platforms

IBM has announced that Gartner, has positioned IBM in the Leader Quadrant in their 2005 Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms. According to Gartner, leaders are performing well today in Web services, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.

Web services platforms are general-purpose technology platforms that have significant influence beyond their primary function. Gartner believes that leadership in influencing Web services technologies and standards is a good indicator of the overall effect a vendor is having on software architectures in general and on enterprises' service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations.

"IBM has helped thousands of customers generate substantial business value implementing Web services as they migrate to enterprise wide SOA deployments," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software. "This success is based on the evolving SOA ecosystem around WebSphere software with independent software vendor as well as business and vertical industry expertise from across IBM."

A Web services platform is an integrated entity that implements Web services specifications to enable the development, execution and management of SOA applications and content based on Web services technologies. The individual parts of a Web services platform cannot serve as a comprehensive platform unless they have underlying integrative processes and technology.

As a platform construct, the basic goal is to provide an infrastructure that enables the extension and use of an "ecosystem" of third-party applications, tools and services. Although much of the value of the Web services platform is as an integrated entity (thus, giving a false notion of rigidity), the nature of platforms (that is, extensibility) provides for many opportunities to augment the platform's capabilities.

According to Gartner, as a broad supplier of technology and services, IBM's Web services and SOA strategy is, at a high level, an effort to bring those technologies and services together into solutions for its customers. From a Web services platform perspective, IBM focuses on supporting its tools and implementing a broad platform for Web services implementation.

In addition, IBM has begun to address the emergence of SOBAs and business application vendors SAP and Oracle in the Web services platform space, as infrastructures and applications blur in a "software stack."

IBM has linked Web services/SOA through its professional-service divisions, most notably through its recent Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) and Component Business Model offerings.

This gives IBM a portfolio of methods, tools and capabilities that consultants from IBM's Business Consulting Services can use to deliver SOA implementations.

IBM needs to build on SOMA to help its customers advance toward new and unified business processes to maintain broad industry influence beyond the scope of its core middleware and integration services.

IBM is well-positioned at a conceptual crossroads in Web services that includes IT services, software and strategy.