Four upgraded products set to ship in fourth quarter 2006 are featured in IBM's plan. The software, according to IBM, helps users handle new workloads and diverse computing environments while providing a secure management foundation for SOA.

With SOA helping customers turn mainframe applications into a collection of reusable business services, mainframe workloads and resources must be managed to simplify integration and lower costs, IBM said.

IBM's Peter Marshall, manager of market strategy for Tivoli, said the products make life easier for customers doing SOA implementations on System z.

"You've got to put all your applications into a SOA and open it up potentially to multiple applications, to clients, to business partners, to end-users," Marshall said. "You've got to have the [IT] management people be able to secure the application, diagnose it at the application level and track that down to the infrastructure at the back end."

Mainframes have changed from providing mainstay business applications to being a hub for Internet-based services such as order processing and customer service, according to IBM. To accommodate the shift in mainframe usage, IBM is introducing the following products: