How large do SOAs loom in IBMs vision for the future?
Swainson: IBM has been helping customers build service-oriented architectures for more than 10 years, because SOA is a design pattern, not a product per se. We have thousands of customers who have built these on WebSphere and MQ. Based on this experience, we have worked with the industry to define a set of standards and have codified successful implementations into a set of templates and guidelines for our services teams to use. We have worked with thousands of customers on Web services and SOA engagements, and we lead the industry in every aspect of SOA, including products, standards, education, services, and experience. Our work includes standards created by the big market share of products like WebSphere MQ enterprise messaging, as well as more formal standards. IBM was a primary driver behind the Web Services Interoperability Organization, and we work with other vendors to introduce specifications for transactions, reliability, management, and grid computing. JSR109 is a recent exa
