IBM Corp. announced on Monday support of open Internet standards for all its major software products as well as new software tools to help users connect applications via the Web, creating so-called Web services.
Products supporting open standards include IBM’s WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database, plus subsidiary Tivoli Systems Inc.’s management tools as well as the groupware products made by Lotus Development Corp., also part of IBM.
The new software tools are designed to enable businesses to create, publish, securely deploy, host and manage Web services, IBM said in a statement.
Supporting open standards, such as UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition), WSDL (Web Services Description Language), and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), eliminates the expensive custom coding currently required to connect enterprise applications.
IBM is, with its support for Web services, entering a field that already has several players, including Microsoft Corp. with .Net and Sun Microsystems Inc. with its Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE).
IBM, in Armonk, N.Y., can be reached at http://www.ibm.com/.
