IBM Corp. recently unveiled an upgrade of its WebSphere application server software that includes new features designed to protect applications from system downtime and boost efforts by developers to create service-oriented architectures. Version 6 of the WebSphere Application Server can detect system outages and ensure that transactions are handed off to another server to quickly restore processing operations and minimize the financial impact of downtime, said Bob Sutor, IBM's director of WebSphere foundation software. "If these transactions don't take place or are stalled in some way, someone is going to have to pay," he said. Sutor added that instead of forcing end users to wait while a server is restarted, WebSphere can document what the disabled system was doing when it crashed and shift the transaction workload to a failover machine in the same data centre or at another location — all in less than 10 seconds.