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HP Vision for SOA Governance Proves Attractive

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: SOA, SOA Governance, SOA Lifecycle, Hall, Business, Stakeholders, Open Source,

HP's expanded portfolio for SOA Governance is attracting a great deal of interest among users and SOA providers.

Over the past two months, TIBCO, JBoss and Capgemini have partnered with HP for SOA Governance, noting HP's expanded portfolio can improve SOA's ability to meet business and IT goals. IDN looks at the new face of HP's SOA Governance with Tim Hall, HP's Director, SOA Center, Software & Solutions.

One key reason HP is attracting so much attention from SOA partners is thanks to its broader vision for SOA Governance.

"It's not just about 'policing,' Hall told IDN. "It's about achieving and measuring benefits for many stakeholders, so we think companies should look at SOA Governance as a way to ensure measureable SOA benefits."

Hall said HP's strategy for connecting-the-dots between SOA Governance and measureable benefits is to "formalize the consumer and provider relationship."

To understand the needs of all SOA stakeholders, HP's SOA Governance looks at all of them as members of an end-to-end SOA lifecycle, he added. Notably, this SOA lifecycle, as HP sees, it, runs from design, test, deployment, and integration for technical teams. It also includes business and corporate managers who need measureable results and ways to change systems quickly.

"When we talk about SOA lifecycle, we go beyond traditional ALM [application lifecycle management], and things related to the software development lifecycle and tooling," Hall told IDN. "For us, the SOA lifecycle that needs governance includes everything from inception of the project, project portfolio management, quality activities, delivery of the project and on-going updates."

How HP SOA Center Meets
Needs of All 'SOA Lifecycle' Members
Enter HP SOA Center suite, which builds upon HP's SOA Systinet offering to meet needs of each of the stakeholder in the SOA lifecycle.

The HP SOA Center also HP SOA Policy Enforcer software and HP professional services, and can also be integrated with HP Service Test Management HP Quality Center software and other offerings to fit the needs of a variety of SOA lifecycle stakeholders.

With this full range of technology, Best Practices and services, Hall said HP's 'SOA lifecycle' provides these key ways that SOA Governance is maturing to meet needs of both IT and business stakeholders.

Achieve and Measure -- With SOA, customers need to specifically achieve the tasks they have pinpointed as important to the business, Hall said. "And just as importantly, they need to be able to measure to see if they're making progress." HP SOA Center provides software and professional SOA consulting to ensure SOA projects map to a customer's needs assessment.

Set and Enforce Policies To Support Business Goals -- Policy enforcement has long been a focus of SOA Governance, Hall said, but today's economic stresses have added a new dimension to "enforcing policies," he said. "SOA Governance is now much more than a policy policeman. It is a way to define and achieve a desired state for your business," Hall told IDN. "Today, we're seeing companies use 'policies' as business milestones that help companies achieve on-going business goals on a day-to-day basis."

Education and Collaboration - "Meeting any metric is a business requires collaboration, and that often means educating your co-workers on the importance of a certain process, rule or whatever," Hall said. SOA Governance is a key method to "get your stakeholders communicating and cooperating - and keeping them engaged."

How Open Source Illustrates
Power of SOA Governance
To illustrate how attention to a meeting stakeholder needs across a lifecycle can reduce complexity and speed benefits for an entire company, Hall turns to the recent explosion in enterprise use of open source software.

"When a company first starts to use open source, it often begins with a small department, where IT finds strong benefits from using code they didn't build themselves, "Hall said. "But with success, you want to scale, and often that [can get] more complicated."

"Once you decide and monitor who can use open source, which open source is authorized, and how to test, deploy and secure it, then you can automate much of those decisions, and get down to the real benefits of applying open source to business problems," Hall said. "The same [process] applies to accelerating business benefits of SOA. That's what HP is doing now with SOA Governance with our [SOA integration] partners and customers."

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