IBM Releases Websphere Version 5

Somers, NY, November 25, 2002 -- IBM today announced the availability of new WebSphere infrastructure software for e-business on demand, IBM's strategy for a new era in business and computing marked by highly adaptive companies that can instantly sense and respond to changing conditions and make business operations easily accessed by others.

IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 5 and its development environment, WebSphere Studio Version 5, will provide the core infrastructure to integrate business processes across the enterprise and with partners, suppliers and customers. This tighter integration allows on-demand businesses to create a more productive development environment, make the best use of computing resources, create an autonomic, self-calibrating infrastructure, and deliver the reliability, security and performance that are paramount to high-volume transactions. WebSphere Version 5 will serve as the underlying universal platform for all of IBM's on-demand software and will tightly integrate with DB2, Tivoli and Lotus.

IBM WebSphere Version 5 includes the industry's broadest support for Web services standards -- a key part of the open, on-demand environment. New, sophisticated support for autonomic computing helps customers deploy and manage their infrastructure, make applications constantly available, optimize performance, and lower administrative costs. With WebSphere 's autonomic features lay the foundation for grid computing, which allows companies to further cut costs by optimizing computing resources and improve response time and availability.

Support for Latest Web Services Standards and Innovations

IBM WebSphere Version 5 is the first infrastructure software to support new Web services technologies based on the latest standards and innovations. It is J2EE 1.3-certified and is J2EE 1.4-ready since it supports many technologies that will be part of future releases of J2EE.

New Web services support includes two technologies developed by IBM and donated to the open source community: Web Services Invocation Framework(WSIF), a technology for invoking and developing Web services across a variety of network and transport protocols, from HTTP to instant messaging, regardless of how the Web service is implemented and accessed and Axis 3.0, new high-speed Web services technology that processes Web services SOAP requests three to four times faster than is currently possible

Other examples of the industry-leading Web services support in WebSphere Version 5 include the Web Services Gateway, which provides a more managed and secure environment for Web services across the Internet; a private UDDI repository, which allows a company to search for combine Web services within their organization; and Web services workflow, so developers can easily build networked applications that link multiple business processes –– such as checking approvals, inventory, credit and shipping – as Web services that interacts with customers, partners and suppliers in a secure and managed environment.

WebSphere Version 5 enables any application in the network –– from Macromedia ColdFusion applications to new Java applications to legacy COBOL assets –– to be easily generated as Web services that can be composed and choreographed into new applications.

New Autonomic Computing Technologies Improve Availability, Performance

WebSphere V5 offers new autonomic features that enable on-demand e-businesses to lower the cost of administration, improve response time by creating a reliable and self-managed infrastructure. The software will deliver better scalability, performance and security, and reduce the need for human intervention. New autonomic features include:

• Self-configuring features to boost responsiveness: WebSphere simplifies the administrator's job by automatically tuning WebSphere for the best performance, or even tuning specific applications based on how they are being used. WebSphere can interact with other IBM software, including Tivoli and DB2, to help make the overall system run better, and cuts the cost of database administration by automatically detecting, diagnosing and resolving problems related to data.
• Self-healing, to build resiliency: WebSphere can intelligently analyze problematic patterns that indicate future glitches, all while applications are running. Customers can troubleshoot problems with real-time diagnostics that build hooks into the system to capture information when a problem occurs the first time around, without having to recreate the problem for the system administrator. WebSphere can even repair components while handling workload, or interrupt or restart the application without human intervention. In addition, applications or server clusters can be updated without having to stop the system, which saves administrators time and money.
• Self-optimizing, to anticipate customer demand: WebSphere enables customers to give prioritized levels of service to priority clients. For example, a bank can provide faster service to large-deposit customers while giving lower priority to small-account clients. It also self-protects the system by restricting the amount of bandwidth a particular application or request can utilize, providing a built-in safeguard for system resources.
• Self-protecting, to guarantee security – in cases where sites are subject to attempts at intrusion, WebSphere acts like a circuit breaker to stop a single point of failure affecting applications that require high availability. WebSphere protects servers by screening out faulty requests, analyzes vulnerability, and assesses damage that may occur. IBM Tivoli Access Manager builds in deep security with single sign-on to provide centralized, site-wide authentication and access control.

With today's announcement, IBM complements the recent rollout of Version 5 of WebSphere Studio, WebSphere's fully integrated, Eclipse-based application development environment, and WebSphere Application Server – Express, which addresses the needs of mid-sized companies from 100 -1,000 employees for an open infrastructure.

Pricing and Availability

WebSphere Application Server Version 5 will be available for download on November 26, 2002. Prices start at $8,000 (single server configuration) or $12,000 (to support networked features such as clustering and failover).

WebSphere Version 5 supports Windows, Linux, IBM eServer zSeries and iSeries, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.

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