IBM sets up SOA shops in China, India

IBM Corp. is setting up development centers in Beijing and Pune, India that will focus on developing industry-specific SOA (service-oriented architecture) services to be reused across various customers.

While the SOA Solutions Center in Pune will focus on the insurance and healthcare industries, its counterpart in Beijing will develop SOA services for the banking industry and government, Jeby Cherian, head of IBM's Global Business Solutions Center in Bangalore, India, told reporters Tuesday in Bangalore. The Beijing and Pune centers will have about 500 staff each.

The new centers will take advantage of the industry knowledge created in IBM’s global delivery centers in India and China, according to Cherian. The global delivery centers in India do work for large clients in the automotive, insurance and healthcare industries, while the delivery centers in China work for large banking and telecommunications clients. IBM also has a SOA design center in China that works with IBM’s clients, Cherian said.

In March of this year, IBM set up a Global Business Solutions Center in Bangalore to operate as the company’s global hub for the management and creation of reusable software components, including SOA services. The Global Business Solutions Center has created about 100 new reusable components in the last six months, Cherian said.

As IBM expands its program to create reusable software, the work on creating reusable SOA business services will now be done by the new centers in Beijing and Pune. The Global Business Solutions Center will focus on non-SOA components such as development of business analytics applications and templates for risk and compliance, Cherian said.

The Global Business Solutions Center in Bangalore and the two new SOA Solutions Centers in Pune and Beijing are the only IBM centers focused on creating reusable software assets, Cherian said.

IBM of Armonk, New York, announced earlier that it is spending US$1 billion this year on building SOA capability. The company forecasts the SOA services market to be $160 billion by 2008.

The creation of reusable SOA services will cut down time to implementation and reduce the risk of delivery for clients, according to Ray Harishankar, IBM Fellow and Global SOA Strategic Asset Development Leader at IBM’s Global Business Services. About 40 to 50 percent of the business processes of companies in an industry are common, Harishankar said. As there are broad standards in SOA, IBM can now develop SOA-based services as reusable assets, he added.

IBM’s acquisition in August of Webify Solutions Inc., a vendor of SOA software and services located in Austin, Texas, has provided the tools, processes and methodologies required to develop composite business services, according to Cherian. These tools, processes, and methodologies will be used at both the Pune and Beijing centers, he said.

Webify also brought relationships with customers in the healthcare and insurance industries, Cherian said.