As part of the announcement, HP is also offering service support to companies that are ready to move beyond the initial pilot stage of SOA development. Zapthink analyst Ron Schmeltzer doesn’t think this puts HP quite in the same league as IBM with respect to SOA, citing a lack of a home-grown middleware company as a disadvantage:

IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn’t own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but they can’t actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.

But we know from past experience that HP and its own middleware companies tend to mix like oil and water.

Read more at: InfoQ