IBM has announced new and enhanced products, which it claims will help telecommunications carriers, equipment providers and application developers take advantage of service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies to rapidly and affordably create, deploy and manage voice, video and data services.

"IBM is enabling service providers to create, combine and deploy new telecommunications services based on emerging technologies," said Tim Greisinger, vice president, Communications Sector Solutions, IBM Software Group. "With IBM's Web 2.0, SOA and IP technology leadership service providers may also have the capability to deliver innovative services with greater speed and quality in a much more open and flexible environment."

The new Rational, WebSphere and Tivoli products are designed to enable service providers to efficiently create, deploy and manage rich new converged services independent of the underlying network infrastructure. The WebSphere offerings build upon the latest release of IBM WebSphere Application Server and leverage reusable IP-based services building blocks based on open standards. The new IBM Rational software includes extensions to standards-based modeling and testing tools, which are key components of an open, service creation environment that supports the design, development, testing and deployment of SIP-based applications in a converged environment.