A new report from IDC concludes that IBM Global Services is a leading "global market maker" for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), demonstrating IBM's leadership in helping clients become on demand businesses, with business processes that are integrated across their company, as well as externally with key partners, suppliers and customers.

SOA is an approach that uses open standards to make a company's business operations more efficient, effective and collaborative. With business processes supported by an SOA framework, a company can make its previously siloed data and software applications better interoperate across business units, as well as with third parties. This can help improve productivity, quickly react to changing market conditions and seize opportunities.

According to IDC, IBM Global Services' leadership in SOA is attributed to a company-wide strategy, deep vertical industry expertise and Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA), a unique methodology that aligns an SOA to a customer's business goals and directly ties business processes to underlying software applications that support them.

"SOA has clearly gained momentum with customers and adoption is accelerating as enterprises transform to on demand businesses," said Michael Liebow, vice president SOA and Web Services, IBM Global Services. "IBM has dedicated resources from across the company to help clients achieve tangible business benefits using SOA that can't be matched by any other single vendor."