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HP unveils SOA platform for enterprises

New software and business consulting services launched by HP to help SOA get into the mainstream.

By Rene Millman, 22 May 2007 at 14:12

HP has beefed up its portfolio of service-oriented architecture products by announcing a raft of software and consulting services capitalising on its acquisition last year of software company Mercury Interactive.

HP SOA Systinet 2.51 software now includes new lifecycle management and workflow capabilities to improve service controls. It has also extended capabilities for policy management configuration for SOA. This is now integrated with other SOA products from the company to enable enterprise-wide policy management.

It has also launched Business Availability Center software for SOA real-time monitoring and management of web services in production.

It has also launched an SOA Centre of Excellence where HP consultants will work alongside SOA project staff at organisations.

Roman Stanek, HP software director said that SOA is beginning to move slowly from proof-of-concept to the mainstream. "It is now all about having good information and using that to lower the cost of IT to organisations," he said. "But companies still need to mitigate the risk of moving to SOA."

Tim Jennings, research director at analysts Butler Group said that were still factors for organisations that inhibited them from moving to SOA. He said that a lack of knowledge, no budget and no recognised benefits to business still hindered many trying to extol the virtues of SOA to a sceptical boardroom.

Jennings said that far from taking organisations away from the silo approach to IT, he said that one CIO of a global bank told him that she eight separate SOA projects on the go and her task was to try to connect them all together.

"It is important to put governance into SOA from the start," said Jennings. "The challenge no for companies is to take a platform neutral stance. This is critical to pushing SOA forward."

Steve Rist, head of the technology practice at project consultants PIPC said that major clients for SOA would be typically multi-vendor anyway.

"Getting it right is not just a matter of technology and architecture, whatever the vendors say," he said. "If benefits are to be reaped then the whole enterprise, often multiple enterprises in the case of integration programmes, must be aligned and focused solely on delivery."