Sonoma serves a subset of RDP for SOA planning only and is configured as a Web service, Chiu said.

He stressed that IBM was not in the application space. "Our job is to enable applications," said Chiu.

IBM brought customer Jeremy King, eBay's vice president of engineering and application architecture, onstage to tout eBay's collaboration with IBM.

Noting eBay's 212,000,000 registered users and its massive infrastructure, King said that if eBay were a country, it would be the world's fifth largest, behind China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. King cited WebSphere as being of particular usefulness at eBay.

"In the end, what really made the difference was IBM's understanding of the service that we would need," King said.