IBM today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned IBM in the Leader Quadrant in their 2005 Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms. According to Gartner, leaders are performing well today in Web services, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.

"IBM has helped thousands of customers generate substantial business value implementing Web services as they migrate to enterprise wide SOA deployments," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software. "This success is based on the evolving SOA ecosystem around WebSphere software with independent software vendor as well as business and vertical industry expertise from across IBM."

IBM customers can transform to on demand businesses that integrate data with partners and suppliers utilizing web services and service oriented architectures. IBM is uniquely able to provide customers with a broad range of resources including business process expertise; leadership in developing Web services standards, industry leading software including WebSphere infrastructure software, Tivoli management software and Rational development tools; and a broad range of professional services to help customers plan, build, deploy and manage services-oriented architectures.

Additionally, IBM recently announced a new initiative to help business partners, independent software vendors and systems integrators successfully implement SOAs with customers. This initiative will further evolve the SOA ecosystem by providing partners access to IBM SOA resources, assets and go-to-market support.

IBM has a broad range of products including WebSphere, Rational and Tivoli middleware and services capabilities-including Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture and Business Component Modeling--to help customers achieve the business benefits of SOA.