With Systinet 3.0, HP broadens SOA governance role to encompass services lifecycle, business processes, IT service management

Hewlett-Packard trotted out the new HP SOA Systinet 3.0 registry today, capping a year of announcements that create a services oriented architecture (SOA) lifecycle portfolio, and extends the governance function broadly -- a cradle to grave approach -- that spans from design time to run time and all the way up to project portfolio management (PPM).

The newest market leading Systinet UDDI registry forms the cockpit for managing not only services, but with the newly added Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) support, takes the helm for business processes, too. HP plans to further push the envelope on a master management value even further into IT operations and IT Service Management, as well as a PPM role with the registry.

HP SOA Systinet 3.0 is designed with broadening the use of SOA governance, and IT governance, in mind. HP Software sees SOA moving toward more enterprise-wide deployment. To get there, the role of the registry itself needs to expand. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Brad Shimmin at Current Analysis has a comprehensive write-up on the earlier announcements and HP's direction for the product.

The new SOA infrastructure component captures more than UDDI information, it encompasses best practices, CMDB information, and sets the stage for a wider "culture of governance" to emerge in enterprises, said Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager at HP Software.

If you've been following HP's acquisitions and development efforts of the past five years, you'll see a distinct pattern of putting the pieces together for a total or master management capability. The goal is not simply putting all the management data in a common repository, but of elevating the visibility into management across more aspects of IT and business processes.

That visibility and the access to the right systems in the right business context then provides the means to further automate IT and SOA activities, to capture best practices and instantiate them back into how IP performs with repeatability and scale.

This latest product release caps a series of significant acquisitions by HP, from Systinet to Opsware. The cradle to grave story of comprehensive IT management and automation is not yet complete, but the strategy is clear. And the pivotal role of the registry is also clear.

The movement is to expand SOA governance, but perhaps more importantly, expand governance in general across more of what IT touches. Rules, roles, business context, policy, development-to-deployment lifecycles, operational efficiency, projects and services -- all need to be brought into a contextual whole. Not by a common product set, but via standards, technology provider inclusion, and with a methodological and cultural commonality emphasis. There really isn't another place to try and find this common framework for stitching together the disparate aspects of IT management -- the SOA registry is as good as we have nowadays.

Of course, the trends in the market make a move toward comprehensive IT service management via automation -- not reactive and disjointed manual stop-gaps -- imperative. As enterprises take up virtualization, cloud computing, SOA, master data management, and such IT shared services approaches typified by ITIL 3.0, then the scale, complexity and range of inter-dependent IT assets needs a better master.

HP is placing a large bet on the HP SOA Systinet 3.0 registry will fill the roles of eyes, ears, and execution coordinator for more of what makes IIT tick.

More information on the release.