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I recently spoke with the folks at HP responsible for shaping and implementing HP’s SOA policy and I must say, I came away impressed. Check out with my interview with Tim Hall, Product Manager SOA, HP Software.

The reason I’m impressed is because, to tell the truth, HP has not been very successful in the past in their software endeavors. For example, do you think of HP as a BPM thought leader? At this point you’re probably asking what BPM product HP has. That’s the point. They had one of the first BPM tools on the market – called Change Engine – but sadly it ended up in moldy dusty HP software dungeon. Unfortunately Bluestone, probably THE BEST application server on the market in terms of engineering elegance, suffered the same fate. I know I should not get attached to technologies – it’s usually be best marketing not the best technology that wins. But still it’s sad to see good technologies die an untimely death.

So I was very interested to hear how HP was articulating its SOA strategy. Realizing the true benefit of SOA, according to Avrami Tzur , HP’s VP SOA, is making sure the services can be shared across the organization. To this end, HP is focusing on governance, quality, and management. This positioning also fits well with HP’s strength in operational management software, and keeps HP’s SOA offering platform independent (a good strategy since HP does not have a platform).

As part of this strategy, HP acquired Systinet – the registry/repository tool, and Mercury Interactive. But while it is not unusual for organizations to buy their way into hot markets, what impressed me is the plan and vision of how these tools work together. Presently the industry is making the distinction between design-time and run-time governance. But Tim Hall correctly points out that governance needs to happen throughout the SOA life cycle, and management must also be performed through the life cycle. In truth, the distinction was introduced due to tool capabilities – not end-to-end governance requirements. Tim is on a mission to get rid of those terms, and instead focus on distinguishing between governance and management.

HP’s life cycle governance offtering is Systinet. The next release, due out in a couple of months, will add workflow to automate the governance life cycle. HP connected the line between reuse and trust and decided to make quality an essential part of the life cycle, which led to the acquisition of Mercury Interactive. From what I have been hearing from practitioners in the field – HP is on the money with this one. I especially like the ability to take the policies from the repository and use them to build test cases. A change in service quality should trigger a new test case. The QA process is then linked back to the repository. Developers considering when to use a service need to know what kind of tests have been run.

The HP SOA Manager is the runtime component which monitors the services in the environment and manages the SLAs. The issue with SLAs is that performance is not dependent solely on the services themselves. It could be an app server or database issue. HP provides end-to-end traceability.

This strategy plays to HP’s strength in systems management. It is well articulated and so far looks like HP is executing well. Tying testing to governance is something that none of the other vendors are doing yet, putting HP in a thought leadership position in this area. Although the services division has been building SOA centers of excellence, HP seemed to be a little late to the market with a clearly articulated SOA offering. IMHO I think HP has positioned itself well to assume a leading role in the with the governance-quality-management offering.

Posted by bethgb at 10:23 AM in Industry News • Industry Trends • SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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