CIOL: What are IBM's achievements in the enterprise market in 2007 and what are the new initiatives in 2008?

NG: .Springboard’s recent research positions IBM as the leading SOA vendor in the APAC region, where "proven products and solutions" is cited as the most important reason for choosing an SOA vendor.
· IBM has developed an SOA Foundation, an integrated set of open standards-based software, best practices, governance models and patterns to help clients model, assemble, deploy and manage SOA.
· IBM already has more than 3,000 SOA clients.
· IBM is best positioned to take advantage of the SOA phenomenon. One of IBM's biggest strengths in the emerging SOA marketplace is its wide breadth of offerings including middleware, business consulting, IT services, Research, SOA-optimized hardware, etc.
· IBM has broken down the barriers to SOA by helping its clients establish an SOA goal and take incremental steps toward that goal through a series of linked projects that have attractive ROI and business value in their own right.
· IBM’s unmatched global customer experience in every industry has helped it build the strongest portfolio of SOA software, consulting services and intellectual property of any vendor. 

With significantly more experience than other vendors and the largest market share, IBM is uniquely positioned to embed guidance based on real customer deployments into SOA — what we call the Smart SOA approach.

Essentially, the Smart SOA approach is a set of guiding principles we developed from working with the more than 5700 customers who use our SOA offerings. The Smart SOA approach benefits both business and IT by extending the business value of deployment. It demands that the principles of simplicity and robustness be applied regardless of what Smart SOA style you select. It also recognizes that your needs are evolving, and while you want to make sure that you are meeting basic needs with basic projects, you also want to make sure you have room to grow when your needs evolve and become more advanced.

Some of the key SOA clients in India include Bharti, DLF, BSNL, Tata Sky, Delhi International Airport , & State Bank of India.