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
&ndash&ndash such as checking approvals, inventory, credit and shipping &ndash 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 &ndash&ndash from
Macromedia ColdFusion applications to new Java applications to legacy COBOL
assets &ndash&ndash 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 &ndash 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 &ndash
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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