HP Expands SOA Governance Portfolio

HP on Monday announced a new set of SOA  governance software and services to geared to help customers accelerate and simplify their SOA-related projects.

The latest release of HP SOA Systinet software includes complete run-time governance of SOA services and service lifecycle management through an enhanced integration with its SOA Manager application.

It also allows developers to proactively check new and existing services against policies established through an Eclipse-based policy validation plug-in—essentially an automated quality-control function that makes sure new services such as opening a new account or verifying a mailing address conform to a company’s business and IT requirements before its installed into production.

“Early in the SOA process, companies need to deploy governance across their organization,” Avrami Tzur, vice president of SOA for HP’s software unit, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. “You want to get developers engaged and practicing governance early. Having a plug-in to the developer environment that validates the policies from Systinet, lets someone know immediately whether the service complies with enterprise practices or not and what they need to do to comply with them.”

HP SOA Systinet Software also provides a dashboard for architects and engineers to see all their organization’s different services and applications as their SOA projects progress. It includes advanced reporting features and customizable search functionality to minimize confusion during an implementation.

HP also unveiled something it’s calling the SOA Registry Foundation, an application specifically designed for independent software vendors (ISV) developing applications on a variety of software platforms. The registry gives developers a standards-based way to publish, categorize and find SOA services.

“Think of it as a table of contents,” Tzur said. “A registry is key for a run-time environment. It’s the only stable thing in this flexible environment.”

Governance is perhaps the least glamorous but most important element to any SOA transformation. HP, through its 2006 acquisition of Mercury Interactive, is betting its focus on SOA governance will resonate with companies who are just beginning to lay the foundation for their SOA-based projects.

“It’s much better to start small and think big than start big and think small,” Tzur said.

HP is also debuting a new services offering, the Validation and Implementation Service for SOA Governance, where HP consultants work with companies to validate their SOA services using the Systinet governance model. In addition to identifying those services that can be reused again and again, the validation service establishes a process for managing the business risk of SOA-enabled services.

Customers can expect to pay between $30,000 to $200,000 for these consulting and implementation services.