LAS VEGAS, NV--(MARKET WIRE)--Apr 7, 2008 -- At IBM's (NYSE:IBM - News) IMPACT 2008 conference, the company today unveiled its present and future strategy, products and services designed to gain a larger share of the $160 billion* service oriented architecture (SOA) market while also reflecting on the milestones that have influenced the business and information technology (IT) community since the introduction of WebSphere ten years ago.

Kicking off the company's IMPACT 2008 annual customer and business partner conference, IBM has made further investments in a burgeoning software industry category, introduced new industry-specific services, and launched new software across the company's entire SOA portfolio. Now, with more than 6,550 customers and 5,000 Business Partners, IBM has doubled its SOA client and partner base in less than one year.

The IBM IMPACT 2008 event is host to more than 6,000 customers and business partners, including both business and IT leaders from all levels of the organization. This year's conference features more than 250 client testimonials including Aetna, Harley-Davidson, Osaka Gas, and SwissRe, making IMPACT 2008 the largest worldwide conference created to meet the growing demand for an educational forum around SOA.

"It's hard to believe that this is only the second annual IMPACT conference because the sheer volume of customers has grown by nearly 50 percent in the past year while interest in SOA among companies of all sizes in all industries continues to rise at an increasingly rapid pace," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM Global Services and SOA. "Working alongside clients all over the world, and helping them realize true business value through an SOA strategy, further validates IBM's commitment and investments in the service oriented architecture market."

SOA is a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align with business goals resulting in greater efficiencies, cost savings, agility, and productivity. The first new offering, WebSphere Business Events, is built on technology acquired from AptSoft in January 2008. WebSphere Business Events helps business professionals directly identify and analyze cause-and-effect relationships among events in real time and identify possible opportunities and threats by automatically initiating a trigger when a trend emerges among the millions of random and scheduled events that occur in companies every day.

WebSphere Business Events complements IBM's newly enhanced BPM Suite. Collectively, IBM now offers the industry's most comprehensive portfolio designed to automatically track, analyze and respond to changing business conditions whether events are planned or unplanned.

IBM is also introducing WebSphere Virtual Enterprise software which allows companies of all sizes to lower operational and energy costs associated with enterprise applications and SOA environments, while increasing business flexibility and process integrity. These benefits are realized by allowing virtualization of the software infrastructure that supports the applications and services critical to today's business processes.

Additionally, IBM is expanding its industry frameworks portfolio with the introduction of the IBM Banking Framework for Customer Care and Insight. This new framework is designed to help banking industry clients better manage and use customer information in order to increase revenue and customer retention, reduce risk, improve operational efficiency, and increase flexibility to support existing and new business strategies.

IBM has also enhanced its ability to help ensure the success of its SOA customers. The company offers a new Agility Benchmark Wizard and industry-specific offerings to support the human capital and financial management sectors through IBM Global Services.

To address SOA security, IBM is also introducing the first IBM security management software designed for SOA environments. IBM will begin recruiting customers for its beta program for the first release of IBM Tivoli Security Policy Manager, which is new software that delivers standards-based security policy management, with WS-Policy & XACML, for SOA. Interested parties can contact their IBM sales representative or business partner for further details, or visit http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/features/SOAsecuritybeta to register.

In order to take advantage of all of these new products and services, and establish a successful SOA strategy, IBM is encouraging the development of interdisciplinary skills through peer-to-peer sharing and community building. To drive this, IBM today announced the SOA Social Network which brings together a community of thought leaders, IT and business professionals, professors, students, and solution providers interested in advancing SOA through both on-line and in person forums. IBM kicked off the global SOA Social Network at IMPACT 2008 with a 72 hour on-line jam providing participants the opportunity to discuss issues, challenges and ideas related to SOA

For more information, visit: www.ibm.com/impact2008

*source: Gartner Dataquest

     Contact:
     Matt Berry
     IBM Media Relations
     (201) 370-9133
     mhberry@us.ibm.com