Big Blue's SOA plans dismissed as disjointed and lacking in third party integration

IBM's strategy for service oriented architectures (SOAs) is disjointed and will mostly appeal to current users of the 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 last week rolled out several new products for its SOA offering at a partner event, 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," Shawn Willettt, principal analyst for application infrastructure with Current Analisys wrote in a report.

But while the SOA products work well within an environment currently using IBM's Rational products, the company is failing to provide information on how they integrate with IBM's Webshpere 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.

He added that there are several holes in IBM's SOA product line-up that require plugging and that so far hasn't provided details on when and how it plans to fill those. The vendor in particular has been vague on its ability to integrate with third party products.

IBM however has some time to correct those problems as the SOA market is relatively immature.