IBM Business Services

WebSphere Business Services Fabric, part of IBM SOA, will support a library of pre-implemented business services that can be bought from IBM. Many of these pre-built services will be inductry-specific for finance, insurance, health care, and so on. Many of these services come from our Webify acquisition. They will embody industry best practices.

These pre-built business services are a build vs. buy tradeoff: These pre-built services enable you to buy business services that make your IT match your business rather than having to build them yourself. Perhaps you could implment them yourself, but it would require time and expense. And then they might be more specific to the way your company does business, but less accurately represent best practices in your industry. Ultimately, like Java libraries, a J2EE container (like WAS, or adapters for legacy systems (like the WebSphere Adapters), why write these services yourself when they're already written for you and available for purchase?

I discuss some of the fundemental value proposition of IBM Business Services in Back to Basics on SOA with Bobby Woolf.