LAS VEGAS, May 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- New technologies in SOA and Collaboration address growing US$61 billion
market

At the IMPACT 2009 conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new
products and services designed to help clients and partners build deeper
relationships with their customers, increase productivity and work in a more
intelligent way.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO )

IBM's comprehensive smarter work approach takes advantage of today's
increasingly instrumented and interconnected world. By improving
collaboration between people and transforming business processes that are
critical to success, organizations can become more agile and responsive to
rapidly changing market conditions and better able to pursue new revenue
opportunities.

Inefficient business processes and barriers to collaboration can hamper
business success, especially in a challenging economic environment. According
to IBM, businesses waste 5.3 hours per employee due to inefficient processes.
Two-thirds of employees believe there are colleagues who can help them do
their jobs better, but don't know how to find them. In addition, 42 percent
of people are forced to make decisions with the wrong information at least
once per week, while 91 percent of CEOs surveyed by IBM said they needed to
restructure the way their organizations work.

"Working smarter means becoming more productive and cost-efficient by
taking advantage of the tools and information that can yield the greatest
benefits in a competitive environment. Through the Lotus and WebSphere
software portfolios, IBM is committed to bringing new collaboration and
business process management capabilities to the market to better enable
customers to work smarter," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM
WebSphere. "With today's announcements, IBM is providing the tools and
strategies to help our clients and partners quickly reap the benefits of
increased agility."

Since the introduction of IBM WebSphere Business Events software one year
ago, IBM has focused on ways to help clients improve their processes. The
acquisition of ILOG in December 2008 further enhanced IBM's industry-leading
portfolio, extending these capabilities with new business rules management
systems.

As part of today's announcement, IBM is expanding on the technologies
gained through the ILOG acquisition, while also updating its existing
business process management (BPM) suite of products. New products targeted at
this rapidly expanding BPM market include:

-- IBM WebSphere Business Events updates - Provides reduced costs by 
       uncovering actionable situations in real time. It helps to deliver the 
       extended enterprise infrastructure through integration with CICS and 
       now support for z/OS.
    -- Business Architecture Services - Aligns business and IT goals through 
       a structured delivery process that is designed to connect an 
       enterprise's business model with its technology models.
    -- New BPM feature packs with enhanced capabilities for business leaders, 
       business professionals, and IT administrators, providing new ways to 
       link strategy to execution and greater task management for faster 
       business returns.
    -- Enhancements to products from the ILOG acquisition include an upgrade 
       to IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules; new features for IBM ILOG Optimization 
       Decision Management Enterprise; and enhancements to the ILOG supply 
       chain management portfolio.
    -- New Key Agility Indicators (KAIs) - All 300 KAIs have been updated on 
       the IBM Benchmark Wizard, reflecting the latest industry and economic 
       data.

In order to be effective, business processes have to connect to a wide
range of systems and people in a variety of ways, efficiently orchestrating
process activities as they flow between these entities. The IBM WebSphere
middleware and IBM Lotus collaboration software support the orchestration of
these complex business activities by helping to ensure process performance
and integrity. Today IBM is enhancing those technologies from its WebSphere,
Lotus and other IBM business groups, including:

-- IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale - Enhanced with REST accessibility, and 
       improved reporting, monitoring and ease of use.
    -- IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging - Featuring enhanced high
       availability features, and expanded platform support.
    -- IBM Rational toolkit for reuse and service enablement - To cut costs, 
       increase agility and reduce risk by leveraging existing enterprise
       assets in new SOA solutions; and updated IBM Enterprise Modernization
       Sandboxes for evaluating SOA reuse for the System z and IBM i 
       platforms.
    -- CICS platform - Additional capabilities for events processing and 
       Web 2.0; Rational developer support for CICS Transaction Server v4; 
       and a new community, CICS Hub on the Rational Cafe for COBOL.
    -- New SOA Infrastructure Healthchecks from IBM Global Technology 
       Services that will help clients identify new opportunities to optimize 
       SOA investments and reduce costs.
    -- New Lotus offerings on the Blackberry - Helping to make real-time
       communications the norm with enhancements for IBM Lotus Connections, 
       IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM LotusLive Meetings.

As part of today's announcement, IBM will also add two new industry
solutions and frameworks to its industry leading portfolio. Industry
frameworks provide a software platform to accelerate deployment of business
solutions. They extend IBM's SOA middleware with industry-specific
capabilities and specially designed process templates. IBM industry solutions
build on the value provided by these industry frameworks with the addition of
IBM and IBM Business Partner professional services helping to deliver a
unique, end-to-end solution for each client.

These Frameworks contribute another essential element of a smarter work
environment by providing a level of collaboration that will allow people to
easily work together with greater speed and in cost-effective ways, helping
them discover, apply and preserve expertise. For example, utilizing IBM's
Healthcare Integration Framework, clients are able to speed their clinical
decision-making by comparing vast amounts of patient and treatment data for
specific diseases and then providing medical professionals and researchers
with actionable results to their queries within a matter of seconds.

IBM is also announcing enhancements to Lotus Live and its Click to Cloud
capabilities. This cloud-delivered, software as a service (SaaS) offering
provides unique features including Web conferencing, file storing and
sharing, contact management, live chat, and business forms integrated with a
business network. These enhancements build on other Cloud-enabled offerings,
including:

-- IBM WebSphere Cloudburst - This "plug and play" appliance manages the 
       full lifecycle of WebSphere Application Server (WAS) virtual images 
       and customer environments, enabling creation of content, scheduling, 
       health management, capacity and usage management, and storage.
    -- New Implementation Services for cloud computing from IBM Global 
       Technology Services will support Cloudburst to help clients deploy WAS
       virtual provisioning for private test clouds.
    -- Rational Build Forge with Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere 
       (including CloudBurst). It provides more than 300 field-proven 
       automated tasks for configuration and application deployment to WAS, 
       and removes manual/complex tasks when managing WebSphere environments 
       and solutions deployed to them.
    -- BPM BlueWorks, a cloud-based set of strategy and business process
       tools. BPM BlueWorks provides business users with the collateral they
       need to implement business strategies within their organizations based 
       on industry-proven business process management techniques.

Today's announcement reinforces IBM's commitment and investment in SOA.
With more than 8,000 customers and 7,400 Business Partners, IBM continues to
build on its SOA market leadership. In fact, industry analyst Wintergreen
recently announced that IBM holds 70 percent of the worldwide SOA market, a
six percent increase over last year.

This year's conference features more than 300 client testimonials
including Bank of America, Con Edison, Shell, Allstate Insurance and Lockheed
Martin, making IMPACT 2009 the largest worldwide conference created to meet
the growing demand for an educational forum around SOA.

For more information on all of the new products and services announced
today or for details on how IBM is helping clients and Business Partners to
make smarter, faster decisions by using SOA, visit:
http://www.ibm.com/press/impact2009

IBM, WebSphere, SmartSOA and the IBM e-business logo are trademarks or
registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. For a
list of additional IBM trademarks, please see
www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM's future
development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are
subject to change or withdrawal without notice. Reseller prices may vary.

Contact:  Chris Rubsamen
              IBM Media Relations
              +1-914-766-1803
              rubsamen@us.ibm.com