IBM consultants model business services

IBM Global Services, the consulting wing of IBM, introduced on Wednesday a service designed to help business customers rework their computing infrastructure to be more flexible and efficient.

The service, called Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture, or SOMA, is meant to help customers develop a long-term plan for moving to a service oriented architecture, or SOA, said Michael Liebow, vice president of Web Services for IBM Global Services. A services oriented architecture is a way to build computing systems so that individual programs can be reused in many applications throughout an organization. Drawing on experience from previous services engagements and IBM research, consultants create a visual model of a company's business processes and recommend how companies should design their overall system architecture, Liebow said. The SOMA service is meant to help companies prioritize their application development projects and construct a long-term plan, he said. The SOMA service offering is one of many consulting and software investments IBM has made in SOAs.