IBM Thursday announced its services division has created a practice aimed at helping enterprises migrate to a service-oriented architecture.

The new SOA Management Practice will help companies handle the management challenges that arise as they scale from individual Web services to full-scale SOA deployments, IBM says.

An SOA is built around a collection of services - such as a credit authorization or a mortgage calculator service - that can be shared, reused and combined to create composite applications across a distributed network.

Analysts say SOAs are beginning to move into the mainstream. According to Yankee Group, 75% of companies plan to invest in the technology and staffing necessary to enable an SOA in the next 12 months. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2009, a services orientation will be the dominant development criteria for more than 80% of new application projects.

Management is a key concern of customers as they look to deploy SOAs, according to IBM.

Customer demand led to the formation of this new practice, said Michael Liebow, vice president of Web services at IBM Global Services, in a statement. After customers' initial foray into SOA implementations, "the major concern we are hearing is the need to make certain that the management capability being deployed now support their needs as customers scale to an enterprise-wide SOA that extends to customers, partners and suppliers,” Liebow said.

IBM Global Services' new SOA management offerings include security services for authentication and authorization; monitoring services for managing capacity thresholds and processing errors; and business performance management services for keeping tabs on business processes and transactions in an SOA.

On the performance front, IBM will help companies monitor service throughput and capacity in an SOA, as well as work with external metering providers for service-level agreement reporting. Integration brokering services address the management of service prioritization, failover, load balancing, dynamic routing, data transformation, scheduling and metering.

IBM Global Services will deploy Web services management products as part of its new practice, including IBM's Tivoli software and third-party management offerings. Big Blue's first partner in this initiative is Digital Evolution, which makes SOA security, management and provisioning products.