New IBM Certification: IBM Certified SOA Associate

IBM has released an entry-level certification for those interested in validating their ability to "articulate the business and technical value of SOA. The candidate can describe the business structure of an organization at a high level and identify where in that line of business SOA can provide value."
The recommend skills are as follows:

• Basic understanding of security concepts
• Basic understanding of multiple operating systems including z/OS
• Basic understanding of broker Publish/Subscribe functionality
• Basic understanding of supported WebSphere Message Broker transports
• Administration experience on at least one supported operating system
• Good understanding of at least one supported relational database product
• Good understanding of the Eclipse tooling platform
• Administration experience on WebSphere MQ V5.3 or WebSphere MQ V6.0

This certification is an addition to the Service Oriented Architecture certification roadmap, which already included the intermediate-level IBM Certified SOA Solution Designer. For more information, visit the ibm.com/certify site.