Click here to send Tim Hall a question -- he'll respond in this space.

Beth Gold-Bernstein: Hello, everyone and welcome to this ebizQ BI in Action podcast. I'm Beth Gold-Bernstein, Director of the ebizQ Learning Center and Chair of the SOA in Action Virtual Conference, which will be broadcast live on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 20th. And I'm here with Tim Hall, product manager of SOA for HP Software. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Hall: Thank you, Beth.

BG-B: Now, as more and more organizations adopt SOA across the enterprise, management and governance are certainly key aspects of successful deployment. And I know HP is focusing on three areas of SOA: governance, quality and management. Can you tell us why HP chose to focus on these aspects on SOA, instead of going for the full SOA platform as some of the other large vendors have?

TH: Sure, Beth. So fundamentally, SOA is about interoperability. And not being tied to one specific platform technology. And one of the things that HP has found in terms of going out and talking with its various customers is that they have a large number of those other large vendors -- middleware platforms and applications platforms -- already in house. And so, HP's value and differentiation to those customers is not so much in delivering them yet another platform but in:

1. Showing how you can successfully integrate using SOA and deliver composite business services to customers and lines of business by starting with the principles of SOA governance, which is looking at things like interoperability and establishing the appropriate certification and profiles for those services so that they do interoperate and work correctly at runtime.

2. Establishing quality to basically go beyond what can be done from the kind of static artifacts, if you will, that define those services and their meta data to ensure that those services functionally work correctly and also scale.

3. And then finally, management, which is really focused on availability and monitoring, payload inspection and in some cases, policy enforcement to ensure that those services actually operate appropriately at runtime.

BGB: Okay. Can I talk about quality for a moment? I know HP acquired Mercury Interactive, a very large testing company. Why did HP choose to focus on this aspect of SOA?

TH: Well, I think this is one of the overlooked areas of SOA which -- when most organizations start their SOA transformation, there's usually a core group of enterprise architects or people involved in what might be called a SOA Center of Excellence that are trying to drive the adoption of SOA across the organization.

And these folks normally tend to be of the "superhero" persuasion, if you will, creating and establishing the first set of services, doing testing themselves and really carrying the service all the way on their backs onto production environment.

And what's really needed to scale SOA up to an enterprise class and wide-scale adoption, which is what is really required to achieve all the benefits promised by SOA, is that all the appropriate stakeholders in the organization get involved and this includes folks from the lines of business, quality assurance teams, the operations teams expressing what their requirements are going to be, and so new tools and technologies are really needed to supplement what quality assurance personnel already use in their environments to test, let's say, Web sites and other applications.

The notion of testing services and the complexity that comes along with testing services and all of the various permutations really can be difficult and so we're really focused on delivering what's different about SOA and delivering the notion of service-oriented quality management so that regression tests and scalability tests and performance tests can be applied to services to ensure stability in the operational environment and also to account for a wide variety of change management scenarios, everything from capacity planning and how you on-board new consumers and ensure that those consumers' new usage patterns meet the performance profiles that maybe you've already tested against, all the way through to versioning.

And so versioning is one of those great mysterious topics in the world of SOA. There are not a whole lot of standards that describe the best practices around versioning. Versioning ends up being this notion of human continuity that we'd like to impose on the machines and when you talk about a version of a service, how can you ensure that that version is, for example, backwardly compatible? So, re-running whole sets of regression tests and ensuring that that version 1.1 actually meets all of the expectations that was originally delivered with 1.0 is something only quality solutions can deliver.

BGB: And I understand that HP has done something really unique in the governance area of connecting governance and quality. Is that correct?

TH: Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the key aspects is, when you are trying to transform your business based on SOA, one of the critical aspects is building visibility and trust between consumers and providers. And as service providers come online, they want to show that potential community of users that can access that service that they've done performance testing; that they've done functional testing, that what specific test cases have been executed and what the status is on all of those tests scenarios.

And so one of the key integration points between governance and quality is actually showing what test cases have been created, established, executed and run, and showing that back through a mechanism by which the consumers can gain visibility into that.

BGB: That's good. I've been hearing from organizations out there that they are struggling with this right now, so that's excellent. Now, while a number of vendors out there are talking about design time and runtime SOA governance, HP talks about governance and management. Can you please explain how HP defines SOA governance and management and what's the difference there?

TH: Sure. I'd actually like to stop using the words "design time" and "runtime" in the context of IT, and especially in the context of SOA because the real thing that customers are focused on is really the lifecycle of the service. And the lifecycle may have stages. But those stages and the lines between the stages are really starting to blur. And one of the things that we're really focused on in terms of governance is governance is an activity that actually occurs throughout the lifecycle of a service.

So, for example, initial stages of governance are things about establishing the definition and description of the service, exposing that to potential consumers, but of course -- the aspect of putting a service into production then says, "All right, what monitoring infrastructure is going to be available to report back on how that service is doing, relative to the goals and objectives that were originally associated with that service?"

And so, the notion of governance and management occurring throughout the lifecycle of the service. Governance really is providing the input, business objectives, goals, for the service. And management is really reporting back on, how are we doing? Are we achieving those objectives? Are we hitting our performance targets? Does there need to be new infrastructure potentially provisioned for that service to ensure the overall service level agreements that potentially have been put in place. And again, these activities are occurring throughout the entire life of the service.

So again -- governance is providing those inputs, objectives, potentially doing validation and verification of those objectives. And management is reporting back on, how are we doing? Have we satisfied the needs of our consumers? Do we need to do more, in terms of either capacity or scale, or in terms of expanding the capabilities of the services that are being provided?

BGB: Okay, excellent. And I just have one last question to close, sorry. HP is obviously a leader in IT infrastructure governance. How do you see SOA, you know, fitting in with the overall IT infrastructure management?

TH: That's an excellent question, Beth. So I think when you talk about IT governance, SOA governance is really a subset of that. It's really a drill down and a focus on what's different about this architectural approach and how functionality can be exposed as a set of reusable services. And that really fits in the overall framework of IT governance. And so, I think that there's a really nice match between those two pieces but I think what SOA governance does, is it really focuses on what's different about that particular approach and what nuances need to be addressed in terms of things like interoperability, version management, the overall lifecycle management of the service, and really, I think specifically defining what are the responsibilities that service providers need to have within IT back to the consumers that are consuming it.

And I'd to maybe put forth a notion that may be unfamiliar to folks in IT but is very familiar to the folks in the telco environment, which is the notion of delivery of carrier-grade IT services. That's really what SOA is trying to drive, which is the notion that you can deliver this set of capabilities and functionality in a reusable way that's going to be available to all your consumers all the time. It's the dial tone of business.

And I think that's a fairly foreign concept to most folks that are in IT today. But really, if we're going to transform business using SOA as the approach, that's really what needs to be firmly fixed in everyone's mind, the delivery of carrier-grade IT services and being able to prove that those services can scale, function and deliver on the SOA and objectives that have been set forth, is really what our solutions are all about.

BGB: Okay. Well, Tim Hall -- thank you very much for joining us today. Once again, this is Beth Gold-Bernstein, signing off. If you'd like an analysis of HP's SOA positioning, please be sure to check out my blog. And I'd like to thank all our listeners for tuning into this podcast. Hope you all have a great day.

Guest Speaker Bio: Mr. Hall is the Product Manager for HP Software’s SOA Center. His personal SOA journey originally started at Talking Blocks in 2001 where he was Vice President of Professional Services and Support. Talking Blocks, one of the original ISVs focused on SOA Management, was acquired by HP in 2003. During his time with HP, Mr. Hall has been driving SOA adoption within and across the entire software portfolio and he has recently returned to focus on productizing what he’s learned about SOA adoption across the life cycle of services including aspects of Governance, Quality and Management. With over 15 years experience in implementing mission critical systems for Fortune 500 companies and building products for emerging businesses, Mr. Hall brings a wealth of expertise to HP Software including product management, delivery, R&D and support. Mr. Hall holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Claremont McKenna College in Science and Management with a concentration in Physics.