SOA With a Difference

After three global centers in Atlanta, Sophia Antipolis in France and Tokyo,

HP's only other SOA Competency Centre is housed in Bangalore. Established with

the aim of helping customers in planning, designing, implementing and managing

Service Oriented Architecture, HP has launched a comprehensive suite of SOA

consulting services which are a tad different from the way the rest of the world

looks at SOA.

Aimed to collaborate between HP and third-party experts, the centre provides

exclusive access to architecture and consulting skills, software and hardware

demonstrations, seminars and hands-on workshops, with the aim of building on

HP's existing SOA consulting services and management software. HP's SOA is

designed to assist customers through the entire SOA process, from envisioning

and assessment to development and governance.

HP offers two critical elements for using SOA to run IT as a business:

management software and professional consulting services. Robust architectural

foundation, extensive research and attractive benchmarks across several

verticals, a global network of third-party providers and HP Services

professionals with expertise in architecture, governance, management, and

security solutions, and a broad portfolio of SOA services-some of the key

elements that HP hopes to capitalize on, in the months to come.

HP's SOA is structured across four virtual layers-at the bottom is the

Technology layer, which essentially consists of the hardware and the physical

network. Sitting on this layer is the Application layer, which includes the

software, applications, real time tools, and other components. The third layer

is the Service layer, which HP claims to be exclusive to its operations. The aim

here is to connect the Sales, Employees, Products and Customers of an

organization, and make their operations transparent. The reason this layer is

stationed above the Applications layer is because Sales, Employees and Customers

use one or more applications for vastly different purposes, but it is the final

product, which is an amalgamation of their efforts. The final layer, is again

exclusive to HP-the business process layer, which is positioned as an end to end

cross functional sales order process-in other words, HP's efforts to become a

one stop shop in creating, monitoring and maintaining a company's SOA.

Evolve, Design, Build, Integrate and Manage-these are the various stages in

this architecture; the most important aspect being that after the Manage phase

is successfully completed, it leads to a new process which starts at Evolve. In

due course of time, there is scope for the architecture becoming more mature,

and in turn, more productive. HP has put enough emphasis in getting the basics

right-Assessment, Governance and Architecture, Service Development, Software

Development and Management. The company revealed that in most cases, the

participation of its customers trickles down all the way to the service

development stages, following the principle that a customer knows best. Having

understood his needs, HP then creates the Service layer which in turn modifies

the business process layer from time to time.

Vishnu Anand