Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 19. Big Blue SOA

In This Chapter

• About Big Blue

• Big Blue and the SOA mission

• Seeing how IBM uses SOA Picture

• Keeping the lights on at Delaware Electric with SOA

• Using SOA at the New York Stock Exchange

Big Blue, in case you haven't heard, is the long-standing nickname for International Business Machines Corporation, typically referred to as IBM.

The company that would eventually become IBM was founded in 1888, which definitely makes it one of the more august figures on the IT landscape today. It has been a leader in the area of business technology since at least the 1920s. In fact, there probably isn't a single technology that IBM hasn't had its hands into over its long tenure in the industry. In its early days, IBM developed machines that actually automated calculations — their famous punch-card machines — which, at the time, was pretty revolutionary. In 1924, the company that grew through the merger of three small companies came into its own as IBM. Over the next decades, IBM was able to evolve into a force in mainframe computing. Over the decades, it added lines of smaller office computing systems and, in the 1980s, revolutionized computing for the masses with the development of one of the earliest commercially focused personal computers. Although IBM had long invested in software alongside its profitable hardware business, an emphasis on software and services began to take shape in the latter half of the 1990s and into the 2000s.

IBM and SOA

IBM's software strategy is particularly ...