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