Deepening its commitment to help corporate users create SOAs (service-oriented architectures) through the use of Web services, IBM Corp."s Global Services unit on Thursday announced the formation of an SOA Management Practice.

Specifically, the new practice will offer guidance to users on Web services and SOA implementation including Tivoli management tools and support for a range of different products and services from independent software providers.

"From what we see many customers have started to experience benefits of their initial SOA implementations, and they tell us they want more. But the major concern we are hearing is the need to make certain that the management capability being deployed now supports their needs as customers scale to an enterprise-wide SOA that extends to customers, partners, and suppliers," said Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services, IBM Global Services.

The new SOA Management Practice will reportedly deliver end-to-end management support capabilities for customers implementing individual Web services to full-scale SOA deployments, according to Liebow.

The management services to be offered include security, monitoring, performance, business performance management, integration broker, catalog, and extensibility.

With authentication and authorization central to SOA management, according to IBM officials, Global Services will offer full support for users" existing Web services security specifications and support for new specifications as they are announced and evolve. Monitoring capabilities will include the ability to manage service capacity thresholds, faults, and predictable and unpredictable conditions.

IBM will also make available an integration broker that includes the management in an SOA of service prioritization, failover, load balancing, dynamic routing, scheduling and metering, and the ability to feed metrics into a billing system, a company spokesman said.

More information about the company"s SOA Practice can be seen at http://www.ibm.com/services.