Can HP Broaden SOA's Appeal? - Page 2

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Looking to the future

Separation of duties is a must-have for compliance regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act , a federal law that establishes new or enhanced reporting standards for U.S. public company boards and their management, and for public-accounting firms.

To ensure compliance, HP's management capabilities for SOA "will work with other kinds of network mediation and compliance solutions," Emo said. HP works with various partners in its Governance Interoperability program.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is viewed as the next step from SOA -- while SOA is based on services created within the enterprise firewalls, SaaS consists of services coming into the network from outside providers. HP is all over that.

"Our solutions resonate very well with SaaS providers because with SaaS you have to establish a contract with your customers and need to have a way to manage those contracts proactively," Emo said.

With the announcements, HP is finally moving into the ranks of real players in SOA management, said Ann Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at The Burton Group. "HP SOA Manager wasn't really comparable to the other management systems out there," she explained. "It had very limited visibility capabilities, but is now getting closer to what AmberPoint and Progress Actional provide."

The other two vendors' products are the AmberPoint SOA Management System, and Actional for SOA Operations, respectively.

However, breaking up SOA Manager into two products still leaves it behind AmberPoint and Progress Actional, which "both provide the diagnostic and visibility component, and can define runtime, security and other policies," Manes said.

While HP Diagnostics for SOA integrates "nicely" with HP operations-oriented products, "you may want to use somebody else's policy management product like Actional's SoapStation with it and that will work reasonably well," Manes said. But Diagnostics for SOA will also "integrate nicely" with Mercury or HP OpenView, she added.