IBM's SOA strategy under fire from experts

IBM is vague about how its SOA products will integrate with third-party offerings

IBM's strategy for service oriented architectures (SOAs) is "disjointed" and will mostly appeal to current users of the firm's Rational software development products, Current Analysis claimed in a research note.

SOA is one of the latest buzzwords in the information industry. The technology provides an architecture to build and maintain applications in an enterprise.

Rather than designing applications from the ground up, SOA allows developers to reuse code between departments and combine resources from all over the company.

IBM rolled out several new SOA products at a partner event last week, including the IBM Registry and Repository, a governance product that stores information about the services.

"The motives of IBM and others are clear: these products are strategic because whoever controls the registry and repository essentially has the key to the SOA environment," said Shawn Willettt, principal analyst for application infrastructure at Current Analysis.

But while the SOA products work well in environments using IBM's Rational products, the company is failing to provide information on how they integrate with WebSphere and third-party products.

"At this stage, the relation of these Rational programs and methodologies to products in the middleware space is weak," Willett claimed.

The analyst added that there are several holes in IBM's SOA product line-up, and that the company has not provided details on when and how it plans to address these issues.

IBM has been particularly vague about the ability of its SOA products to integrate with third-party offerings.

Willett acknowledged, however, that IBM has some time to correct the problems as the SOA market is still relatively immature.