HP ramps up integrated SOA management and lifecycle offerings

HP has unleashed a slew of product updates and enhancements to provide lifecycle services quality and management support, moving ever closer to a comprehensive mission-critical SOA maintenance portfolio.

Today's launch covers a wide range of products and includes new versions of Service Test and Service Test Management. At the same time, HP's Software group added new capabilities to Business Availability Center for SOA, Diagnostics for SOA, and SOA Policy Enforcer.

HP says that these product enhancements will help users accelerate enterprise-wide level SOA adoption by providing assurances that services meet design and operational requirements. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Highlights of the new versions and capabilities include:

Service Test Management allows quality assurance teams to plan, design, and execute their activities from a SOA perspective and to instantly report on pre-production quality. By integrating this with SOA Systinet, teams can alert users that services are ready for consumption.

Service Test enables functional testing of SOA services, reducing the risk of application failure and is fully integrated with the extended BTO portfolio across the service lifecycle.

Business Availability Center (BAC) for SOA manages shared services within the existing operational IT infrastructure and processes, reducing deployment risk by ensuring that services are actively managed. It also provides proactive problem resolution before services impact consumers and business processes.

Diagnostics for SOA allows teams to identify and resolve problems by drilling down into shared services. This can operate in standalone mode or can integrate with BAC for SOA.

Policy Enforcer monitors and enforces security, performance, and other operational requirements. Monitoring data is fed directly into Diagnostics for SOA for analysis.

These products, embracing HP's BTO and Systinet SOA registry offerings, pulls together the design time and runtime elements of SOA to produce the scale and quality management assurance that telecos, financial firms and healthcare providers are demanding, said Kelly Emo, HP Software's SOA Product Marketing Manager.

The combination of these enhanced products and SOA methodologies allows for quality assurance, testing and requirements definitions to produce the services and processes that then require mission-critical operational service management, says HP.

"There's now more integration for a SOA lifecycle," said Emo.

I'm often fielding questions from enterprise IT strategists on how SOA design can be implemented to assure quality performance, especially in dynamic use patterns. The previous management approaches to distributed applications needs to be promoted to SOA scale, many of these organizations are finding.

It's important not to confuse SOA governance with performance management. SOA governance will help define the best ways that services can and should be used, and how to provide policies and guidelines for those orchestrating and consuming services and composited business processes. But the infrastructure beneath all of that governed SOA activity needs to be managed, and performance needs to be maintained.

In the best of al worlds, these functions relate well and can be managed and refined in unison, a vision that HP is obviously embracing with today's announcements.

More information about the HP SOA portfolio is available from the HP Web site.