IBM today announced new software and services to help organizations ensure quality of their service oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA is a business strategy that enables a company to more closely align and reuse existing technology to achieve business goals. The new IBM SOA quality management portfolio -- which includes Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere software as well as new technology services -- will help improve the overall quality of technology in an SOA before it is deployed. Organizations are now recognizing the growing need to test and model an SOA before it is introduced across the company. For example, Trinity Software Solutions, an IBM Business Partner working with a United States Government agency involved in tax collection, processing and auditing, needed to ensure compliance, functionality, and performance of their customer's Web, SAP, mainframe and SOA applications. By governing quality across the entire IT lifecycle, Trinity Software is helping the U.S. Government agency improve team efficiency, produce higher quality software faster, reduce human errors involved in software testing, and mitigate software development and deployment risk. With IBM's new SOA quality management approach, clients have a robust process for maximizing the value of implementing SOA and are linked to IBM's SOA entry points which are people, processes, information, connectivity and reuse. Clients utilizing IBM's SOA quality management process can assure their services meet business requirements by validating service functionality and operations through the SOA lifecycle. Only IBM can supply the process, technical services and enabling tools to support the end-to-end requirements of SOA. "At the top of CIOs' wish lists today are service-oriented architectures which can help drive greater business flexibility, improve operational efficiencies and align IT investments more effectively with business priorities," said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy, IBM Rational. "Critical to the success of any SOA project is managing quality throughout the lifecycle." New IBM SOA quality management portfolio Adopting an SOA brings unique challenges for software development teams trying to maintain high quality, for example the ability to detect and test a service that is reused in an 'unintended' new application. The new IBM quality management solutions will automate the testing of web services within an SOA. These tests validate that the SOA functions as it was designed and interoperates with the rest of a company's infrastructure. The new software also ensures the system is able to perform with a heavy volume of users, determines the maximum system capacity, and identifies and resolves any performance problems, critical to meeting complex service level agreements in an environment comprised of a large number of services. Through its visual test editor and other features, the IBM Rational quality management solutions can also produce customized results with virtually no programming knowledge required. The following IBM software and services will provide organizations with the tools and expertise needed to ensure SOA quality: - IBM Global Technology Service's Testing Center of Excellence for SOA - available 2Q 2007, offers a combination of skills, methods and technologies to provide best practices and thought leadership for testing SOA implementations. As part of this service, IBM specialists develop comprehensive test plans for SOA architectures, manage the testing process and execute integration, performance and scalability testing. - IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality -- available worldwide on March 27, this new offering tests the functionality of Web service-based applications; - IBM Rational Performance Tester Extension for SOA Quality -- available worldwide on March 27, this new offering tests the performance of Web service-based applications to ensure scalability; and - IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager -- new response time and application management dashboards are now included in the highly scalable suite of 23 monitors that measures services' availability, performance and content through periodic polling of distributed points, then uses these Web-based reports to confirm service level agreement adherence and end-user satisfaction. Rounding out IBM's SOA quality management portfolio is software and process guidance to help clients proactively respond to quality issues throughout the SOA lifecycle. This portfolio builds upon IBM Rational quality management best practices of iterative and ongoing testing enabled by integrated requirements, defect and change management capabilities as well as collaborative data-sharing across the IT team. The offerings include IBM Build to Manage Toolkit for Web Services, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, IBM Rational RequisitePro, IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, IBM Rational Portfolio Manager, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere, IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational Application Developer, IBM Rational BuildForge, IBM Rational ClearQuest, IBM Rational Method Composer and the Tivoli Unified Process. In support of IBM's SOA quality management portfolio, the following IBM Business Partners are delivering offerings validated on the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform: Black Duck Software, BSD Group, Klocwork, Ounce Labs, RingZero, SPI Dynamics and Watchfire. All of these users have been validated through the Ready for IBM Rational software validation program. For more information on IBM quality management solutions, visit its Web site.