HP introduced new and enhanced quality and management software designed to increase the success of mainstream deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA) by businesses.

SOA is an approach to delivering IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected, reusable and standards-based technology that can be aligned to changing business needs.

For SOA to be broadly adopted and deliver business value, an entire organization must have confidence that the services it provides function correctly, scale as demand increases and meet operational requirements.

To make certain that services meet all functional and performance objectives and are ready for production deployment, HP introduced new versions of its market-leading SOA testing products, HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management.

“Customers who want to scale their SOA-based deployments recognize they must make SOA a seamless part of their quality and management infrastructure to support business requirements,” said Tim Hall, director of SOA products, Software, HP. “HP delivers an integrated solution that includes SOA governance, quality and management. Our modular approach gives customers the confidence to quickly progress from initial SOA pilots through to enterprise-scale deployments.”

In addition, HP announced new SOA management capabilities with HP Business Availability Center for SOA, HP Diagnostics for SOA and HP SOA Policy Enforcer that together better monitor services in production, resolve operational issues and deal with changes to services.

These software products accelerate enterprise SOA adoption by providing assurances that services meet or exceed design and operational specifications. By integrating these solutions across the complete service lifecycle of planning, quality and operations, customers have confidence that services can be trusted to support critical business applications without risk of failure or performance degradation.

“As SOA becomes an increasingly mainstream approach to enterprise architecture, HP continues to offer governance, quality and management products that form essential SOA infrastructure,” said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at SOA advisory firm ZapThink. “HP’s new SOA testing and management products provide the framework enterprises require to ensure IT delivers production-ready services that can support business-critical applications and processes, making it easier for Quality Management and Operations groups to support SOA-based applications while leveraging existing IT investments and talent.”

HP Quality Management for SOA
HP’s Quality Management solutions for SOA give enterprises the assurance that services will function reliably in any deployment environment. New capabilities to these solutions include:

• HP Service Test Management
• HP Service Test

HP SOA management
HP’s SOA management solutions will work standalone for small SOA projects or large-scale deployments and fully integrate with enterprise IT management capabilities. This flexibility gives SOA architects the confidence that initial SOA project efforts will be embraced by IT operations groups as services adoption increases. New capabilities to HP SOA Management products include:

• HP Business Availability Center (BAC) for SOA
• HP Diagnostics for SOA
• HP SOA Policy Enforcer

“In our heterogeneous SOA environment, it is essential that we are able to automate the governance process with seamless integration with the testing and deployment of services,” said David Lindley, enterprise architect, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. “This is especially critical as we scale up our development of services and move from a bottom up to a top down approach.”

HP’s SOA enablement solution offerings provide best practices and new products for automating the SOA governance, quality and management processes required for successful SOA adoption. HP also provides services to speed the creation of both SOA strategy and development. HP’s approach supports the heterogeneous nature of technology organizations and enables customers to effectively institute SOA solutions regardless of the underlying applications, platforms and infrastructure already in place.

For more information on HP contact Erin Muhlhan, erin.muhlhan@bm.com