30 Minute Interview

IBM and SOA

Ray Harishankar, IBM Fellow & Global SOA Strategic Asset Development Lead, Global Business Services, IBM Corporation speaks to Mohd Shariff PA about operational strategies that will enable IBM’s GBS to build a strong portfolio of SOA based assets.

Ray Harishankar

The role of IBM’s GBSC and SWG

The Global Business Solutions Center (GBSC) has the primary role in developing new solution assets, working with client teams and business partners. A Solution Asset Enhancement & Maintenance will sponsor all development where the GBSC performs ongoing enhancement and maintenance of solution assets. The additional work will be directed and approved by the Solution Board that ‘owns’ the asset. Delivery Support for Mature Solution involves the GBSC providing delivery support and subject matter expertise for solution assets. The GBSC is fully integrated into the broader Global Delivery model.

Through the Global Business Solutions Center, IBM creates and enhances a portfolio of replicable industry solutions that are developed by combining the strengths of IBM’s business consulting, research, software, systems, engineering, and emerging technologies. These new solutions will be built based on IBM’s Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology, and in collaboration with IBM clients and business partners. This allows clients to gain immediate access to IBM’s best ideas, industry expertise and methods in more than 50 key business areas such as Consumer Driven Supply Chain Optimization, Banking Risk and Compliance, and Retail Merchandising. In the last 15 months, since its launch, GBSC’s headcount has grown from 60 people to over 600. GBSC has created 120 assets till date, and IBM spends $300 million as annual funding on this center.

Industries adopting SOA

Since its inception in 2006, GBSC experts have completed 120 projects, resulting in 120 solution assets. To drive reusability of these assets, all of them have been developed, delivered, and maintained on a SOA platform. This helps in rapid adoption by clients across industries and geographies, irrespective of their IT environments. Clients are looking to derive a new kind of value from their services partners. They are seeking a partner who can help them rethink their business model and their business operations, optimize those operations, drive new kinds of business growth, and in some cases, run those processes and share some risk in the future of their business. They see opportunities in their industries that will require innovation, which is more than relationships or low-cost delivery. It’s also not a simple question of throwing labor at a problem. It’s about being smarter in analyzing and addressing what the client is trying to accomplish. The services partnership with research is critical here. Last year, IBM created a new center in India that serves as the foundry for these solutions, enabling IBM them to deliver the rapidly and cost-effectively through its network of delivery centers worldwide.

GSBC as client value

This is not just R&D, it is an innovation center. It boasts impressive technical and business brainpower. Global Delivery Centers offer capabilities aligned around centers of expertise staffed by practitioners with industry expertise and technology skills. Unlike a technical R&D lab that has its own long-term research agenda, here all solutions developed by GBSC will be cleared by the IBM’s industry solution board, an internal cross divisional committee that identifies industry-specific, short term business needs. To drive accountability, each GBSC projects gets a solution owner and this process is committed to scaling the solution’s client adoption across one or more verticals within a six to 15 month period.

India at the top of the business pyramid

Though India may be at the bottom of the economic pyramid, it is at the top of the business model pyramid. It is home to innovative local companies such as Bharati that outsourced its entire communications network and IT infrastructure. IBM is eager to introduce these Indian companies’ disruptive business models and ground breaking IT applications to global clients and users in other emerging markets, which critically need them.