CIOL: How has IBM been able to capture the Indian Enterprise market?

NG: Springboard Research’s latest report expects the SOA market in India to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent from 2007-2010 making it the fastest growing market in the regions. According to the same report, IBM remained the leading SOA vendor in the Asia Pacific region.

Probably one of the biggest hurdles to SOA is a clear understanding and awareness by the marketplace of SOA and its benefits. IBM recently opened the SOA Leadership Center in India designed to address the growing demand for skills needed to solve customer business challenges using Service Oriented Architectures. The center is set up in Bangalore and is the first of its kind in Asia Pacific and the fourth of a series of SOA Leadership Centers planned across the world.

This Centre will provide a venue for customers and IBM Business Partners to see SOA solutions in action through SOA proof of concepts to demonstrate the potential benefits of SOA in a customer's existing IT infrastructure. The Center will also help address SOA skills through relationships with local universities. Through these relationships, IBM is helping to shape the curricula and provide opportunities for students to develop the proper skills to succeed with SOA in their chosen fields when they enter the workforce. Local students can have the opportunity to serve as interns at these centres, work hands on with technologies that support SOA and attend education sessions delivered by IBM experts.

In India, IBM and IBM Business Partners are taking an end-to-end approach to SOA which allows enterprises to customize the speed of their technology implementation.

IBM's approach to SOA includes low cost offerings on popular Windows, Linux and System i platforms to help protect your current skills and applications. The easy to learn and use tools let you connect applications and transform information, helping deliver consistent and accurate information to employees, partners and customers.

Another is the "how do I get started" question as many businesses may feel overwhelmed. IBM has defined five SOA entry points based on real customer experiences and engagements and we believe that SOA is best approached on an individual project basis:

To help them get started with SOA, IBM offers 5 business-centric and IT-centric SOA entry points. They can get started with an approach that begins with the fundamental assets of their enterprise—people, information and processes.

The people entry point is a starting point for SOA, enabling people to interact with application and information services that support business processes. As a complement to the other entry points — process, information, reuse and connectivity—the people entry point can facilitate real time decision making and dynamic collaboration, and immediate execution. Overall, the people entry point approach to SOA drives business and operational flexibility and improves end-user productivity and collaboration.

The process entry point is a business-centric starting point for service oriented architecture (SOA) that provides specific tools and services to help streamline and improve processes across the enterprise. By entering SOA from process vantage, you can establish the foundation for IBM's business process management with SOA.

Information as a service is an entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that offers information access to complex, heterogeneous data sources within your company as reusable services. These services may be available both within the enterprise and across your value chain. By entering SOA from an information vantage, you may improve the availability and consistency of information, while simultaneously removing traditional barriers to information sharing.

Service creation and reuse is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) that focuses on deriving continued value from previous asset investments, identifying services to be outsourced and designing new services to fill portfolio gaps. By entering SOA from a service creation and reuse vantage, you may expand access to proven systems and achieve greater value from your existing technology investments. In fact, a study by Software Productivity Research found that it can be up to five times less expensive to reuse existing services and applications than to rewrite them.

Service connectivity is an IT-centric entry point to service oriented architecture (SOA) designed to help simplify your IT environment with a more secure, reliable and scaleable way to connect within and beyond your business. Link people, processes and information in your business with a seamless flow of messages and information from virtually anywhere at anytime using anything — that's true connectivity. SOA brings new levels of flexibility to such linkages. Delivering real business value on its own, connectivity is also a core building block for future SOA initiatives.