This week, IBM put its money where its mouth has been for quite some time: on service oriented architectures (SOAs).

As part of a massive reorganization of its software and services portfolio, IBM finally announced its long-anticipated enterprise service bus (ESB) that has been in the works for years.The WebSphere Enterprise Services Bus should help businesses tie together Web-services-based applications, and integrate formerly disparate systems. IBM also debuted the WebSphere Process Server, and a new version of the WebSphere Message Broker, which will allow companies to bring in non-standards-based applications into the SOA fold.

To help developers build SOA-compliant composite applications, IBM took the wraps off Eclipse-based WebSphere Integration Developer, and promised to bring to market products in its Tivoli portfolio of management tools that are specifically designed to manage composite applications.

IBM has been focusing on SOA-related services for some time, with its dedicated practice for servicing SOA-bound businesses. Last week, IBM strengthened its services offerings by unveiling new practices to help users measure the performance of SOAs, manage them, and track SOA projects. A number of industry-specific teams have also been forms to help companies in a variety of vertical segments.

Of course, IBM isn't the only company aggressively courting the enterprise world in the hopes of reaping revenues from the massive shift to SOAs (Gartner predicts that the vast majority of larger enterprises will have some component of SOA in their IT infrastructure within the next two years). In addition to all the best-of-breed smaller players that sell SOA products and services there are the industry heavyweights such as BEA and Tibco that are vying for the hearts and minds of SOA-bound businesses. But IBM has a leg up on all these things, with a rich portfolio of products and services that promise to deliver real value to the enterprise. It will be interesting to see how its competitors respond to this major announcement. Stay tuned.