A new report from IDC concludes that IBM Global Services is a leading "global market maker" for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), demonstrating IBM's leadership in helping clients become on demand businesses, with business processes that are integrated across their company, as well as externally with key partners, suppliers and customers.

SOA is an approach that uses open standards to make a company's business operations more efficient, effective and collaborative. With business processes supported by an SOA framework, a company can make its previously siloed data and software applications better interoperate across business units, as well as with third parties. This can help improve productivity, quickly react to changing market conditions and seize opportunities.

According to IDC, IBM Global Services' leadership in SOA is attributed to a company-wide strategy, deep vertical industry expertise and Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), a unique methodology that aligns an SOA to a customer's business goals and directly ties business processes to underlying software applications that support them.

According to IDC, Market Makers are at the forefront of SOA and have devoted significant resources to developing skills, tools and methodologies.

"SOA has clearly gained momentum with customers and adoption is accelerating as enterprises transform to on demand businesses," said Michael Liebow, vice president SOA and Web Services, IBM Global Services. "IBM has dedicated resources from across the company to help clients achieve tangible business benefits using SOA that can't be matched by any other single vendor."

"Officially entering the SOA space in the fall of November 2003, IGS has continued investing huge amounts of time and resources to cover all opportunities around SOA from a comprehensive portfolio of services offerings to an in-depth verticalization," said Sophie Mayo, director for IDC's Worldwide Services and Services-Oriented Architecture Research. "Since then SOA has been center stage in the strategic direction of IBM."

IBM has made significant investments to help clients become on demand businesses using SOA. These include new initiatives to help IBM's business partners successfully deploy SOAs by providing them access to IBM SOA resources, assets and go-to-market support. Clients also benefit from IBM's SOA Centers of Excellence and a key strategic relationship between IBM Global Services and IBM Software. This affords clients the ability to leverage capabilities in industry leading expertise and IBM's marketplace leading WebSphere infrastructure software.