HP launches SOA on the world

Posted by Mark Little on May 24, 2007

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Fresh from its assimiliation of Mercury (fresh from its assimilation of Systinet), Hewlett-Packard has announced a new suite of SOA related products and services. As Radovan Janacek (ex-Systinet, ex-Mercury, current-HP) points out, they even retained the Systinet name for some of them. Anne Livermore, EVP Technology Solutions Group in HP had this to say:

“SOA is entirely transforming the way IT is created, delivered and consumed, providing organizations with a software and systems infrastructure that is more agile and cost-effective and that delivers better business outcomes. HP is committed to providing the tools and expertise customers need to begin adopting SOA successfully. Our open, standards-based approach maximizes the business benefit from their SOA initiatives.”

The suite, called the Business Technology Optimization for SOA (BTO), is apparently an integrated set of software and services designed to help customers address some of the biggest challenges in SOA adoption, including:

• Control over the lifecycle of services creation and reuse;
• Reducing the risk of low-quality, poor-performing services;
• Managing services and application in production;
  
• Identifying and resolving SOA-related problems before they negatively impact the business;
• Utilizing services regardless of the underlying integration platform.
  

Anne Thomas Manes, VP and research director of Burton Group (and ex-Systinet from several years before the acquisitions) agreed that governance of SOA is critical to the success of any deployment:

“A strong governance, quality and management program – addressing the entire service lifecycle from design and development through operations and maintenance – is critically important to a successful SOA initiative. Enterprise-wide SOA systems are likely to encompass heterogeneous computing environments; therefore, organizations should adopt a standards-based, platform-neutral approach to governance, quality and management, and they should keep interoperability high on their list of priorities.”

The suite offers solutions in the following broad categories:

• Governance, through HP SOA Systiner 2.5.1, which includes new service lifecycle and policy management along with workflow capabilities.
• Quality, by extending the existing HP Change Impact and Business Process Testing packages so they are SOA-aware.
• Management, with the HP Business Availability Center that delivers real-time monitoring and management of Web Services
  

As part of the announcement, HP is also offering service support to companies that are ready to move beyond the initial pilot stage of SOA development. Zapthink analyst Ron Schmeltzer doesn't think this puts HP quite in the same league as IBM with respect to SOA, citing a lack of a home-grown middleware company as a disadvantage:

IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn't own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but they can't actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.

But we know from past experience that HP and its own middleware companies tend to mix like oil and water.

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   Systinet... Mercury... HP...

   by leo de blaauw

   Well,
   
   Having had quite some exposure to the systinet webservices stack it has allways been a pleasure to work with, allthough after the mercury take over it seemed that development pretty much stalled. So I havent looked at it recently but maybe I should revisit it again soon.
   
   Leo

   Reply

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   Re: Systinet... Mercury... HP...

   by Mark Little

   I agree: I've been using Systinet (originally Wasp) since 2000 and it's always been great quality. Given my own experience, I'm sure that HP won't let the quality degrade. It'll just be a case of whether they can convince the market they are a serious player and their own salesforce that this is something other than hardware that will make money.

   Reply

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   Re: Systinet... Mercury... HP...

   by Stefan Tilkov

   I have serious doubts that HP would care about the Systinet Servers (for Java and C++) - it's sad because they were (and probably still are) great products, but the focus is very, very obviously on the governance tools.

   Reply

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   Re: Systinet... Mercury... HP...

   by John Harby

   I agree with Stefan. It is too bad these products ended up at HP. HP will look at their books, see that they're making the most money on their printers and this area will either end up underfunded or scrapped.

   Reply

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   Re: Systinet... Mercury... HP...

   by Pawel Jasinski

   The refocusing is already happening. They have shut down the systinet forums. It doesn't look like there is a plan to reopen them (i hope i am wrong).
   
   "Effective immediately we will close the online forums at systinet.com.
   This is part of our ongoing migration of SOA online community activities to HP.
   We will continue to provide product support, tutorials, whitepapers and webcasts at our website, and at www.hp.com/go/soa ."

   Reply