IBM on Thursday introduced consulting services to help companies build and manage service-oriented architectures, an indication that the next-generation model for distributed computing is gaining traction in the information technology market.

The new practice from IBM Global Services will include management products from IBM's Tivoli division, as well as support for a number of products from third-party software providers, including software tools from Digital Evolution Inc., a Santa Monica, Calif.-based, provider of Web services security and management software.

Corporations are moving toward SOAs as a way to integrate IT systems in order to automate business processes, which reduces costs through added efficiency. SOAs are based on web services, an umbrella term for a set of standards for tying applications together.

Ron Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink LLC, said IBM has more than 35,000 SOA-trained consultants and plans to generate more than $100 million in revenue from its SOA efforts next year.

"In general, we're seeing the market for SOA products and services mature considerably, and we've seen both the size, scope, and cost of these engagements go up considerably," Schmelzer said. "By all counts, hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent this year and next on SOA engagements - and IBM is poised to capture a large part of those deals."

IBM said it launched its SOA Management Practice because customers were scaling up their small-scale web services implementations into full-scale SOA deployments that extend to customers, partners and suppliers. Such ambitious projects have created a demand for management tools and consulting.

"The creation of this new practice, specifically focused on SOA management is a direct result of demand from our customers," Michael Liebow, vice president of web services, IBM Global Services, said in a statement. "Many customers have started to experience benefits of their initial SOA implementations and want more."

Management services that IBM plans to offer will encompass security, monitoring of transactions, application performance, integration and extensibility. The latter applies to extending integration to systems outside a corporation and to supporting disparate programming models, such as the Java 2 enterprise and Microsoft Corp.'s .Net platforms.

The market for software tools that manage applications tied through web services are expected to reach $30.4 billion by 2010 from $194 million in 2003, according to ZapThink. About 85 percent of the market is expected to be dominated by current system-management vendors, which include IBM and rivals Computer Associates International Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft.