SOA centers take apps apart to put them back together

For now, the company’s strategy to create reusable assets is based at the GBSC in Bangalore and the SOA Solutions Centers in Pune and Beijing. While 500 staff at the SOA Solutions Center in Pune will focus on the insurance and health care industries, its counterpart in Beijing, also with 500 staff, will develop SOA services for the banking industry and government.

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Locating the SOA Solutions Centers in India and China was no accident.

First and foremost, IBM has a presence in both countries and is familiar with their cultures, and hence can take advantage of the engineering skills and relatively low cost of labor available in these countries, says IDC’s Hedin. But there are also deeper reasons.

IBM is using technology from its acquisition of SOA software and services vendor Webify Solutions as the foundation for building composite business services. Webify, which was headquartered in Austin, Texas, already had a development center in Mumbai, near Pune. IBM also has considerable software development capability in India through its India Software Lab in Bangalore.

“What we are doing in composite business services is essentially software development, so we could take advantage of the skills there,” MacIntyre says.

The same can be said of the second SOA Solutions Center, set up in China, where IBM operated a software lab with an SOA design center, bringing a combination of software and SOA skills, MacIntyre says.

The software produced in the two SOA Solutions Centers will get incorporated into the bigger solutions that IBM’s network of global delivery centers, located in 21 countries, are putting together for customers, MacIntyre says.

IBM’s global delivery centers, particularly the ones in India and China, also play a key role in helping the company identify business processes that could be potentially made into reusable components. There will be synergy between the global delivery centers and the SOA Solutions Centers in both countries, and the delivery centers can bring ideas for reusable assets back from the customer, Hedin said.

The Indian global delivery center, for example, supports eight of the largest telecommunications companies, five of the largest insurance companies, and three of the largest health care companies, and it has built strong industry expertise and process knowledge in the industries it serves. The delivery centers in China work for large banking and telecommunications companies.

“As these centers build solutions for customers, there are all sorts of things we could learn, and we would harvest that, and bring that into the SOA Solutions Centers,” MacIntyre says.

“It has happened often that the people at the delivery center doing the ‘solutioning’ for a customer come back to us and say that they have found a particular requirement from, say, 10 customers, and ask us why don’t we develop a reusable asset for it,” Cherian adds.