“The Rome SOA Leadership Center is dedicated to the technology and application side of innovation,” said Andrea Pontremoli, General Manager IBM Italy. “It is the ideal resource to increase SOA-based technologies for customers, partners, and users who are facing this architecture. It is the right solution for customers looking for advanced solutions.”

IBM new SOA Leadership Center in Rome, Italy, is designed to address the growing demand for skills needed to solve customer business problems using service-oriented architectures (SOA). IBM customers, Business Partners, and university students are expected to benefit from this new structure.

SOA is a business strategy that helps a company reuse existing technology to more closely align it with business goals, helping to result in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity.

The new SOA Leadership Center will serve as a focal point to harness the SOA skills and expertise from IBM product and services teams, IBM Business Partners, as well as universities to address the skills and knowledge customers in key markets need to reach business goals using an SOA. The center will be staffed by IBM SOA experts and will focus on three key areas: SOA education and training; SOA implementation support; and SOA exhibitions and demonstrations.

The skills come from a global team of experts and from the technical competences of the IBM Rome Software Laboratory always in contact with the Italian enterprises and the academic world in order to develop knowledge and build experience on SOA.

The Center will host SOA briefings and architect summits for customers and will house SOA demonstrations and workshops for customers and IBM Business Partners. In addition, the Center will provide a venue for customers and IBM Business Partners to see SOA solutions in action through SOA proof of concepts and proof of technology to demonstrate the potential benefits of SOA in a customer’s existing IT infrastructure.