HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC., said the SOA Manager/Systinet combination “brings together design time and runtime SOA governance in a single integrated lifecycle, essentially providing closed-loop SOA governance.”

The public availability of the GIF specification is the other important part of the HP governance announcement today, Bloomberg said. “The GIF news is important because it will help drive long-needed interoperability in the industry among a wide variety of SOA-related offerings.”

Read more at: SearchSOA

The SOA Governance Timeline

Governance consists of creating, communicating, and enforcing policies in a corporate environment. In many ways, it is the key to maintaining the balance between executive control and employee and customer empowerment.

Implementing SOA requires governance in order to ensure that the organization applies and enforces the policies that apply to the Services that the organization creates as part of its SOA initiative. But more importantly, organizations can leverage SOA best practices to represent policies broadly in such a way that the organization can achieve better policy management, flexibility, and visibility into policy compliance across the enterprise. Because of these two characteristics, enforcing policies and leveraging SOA best practices, it is critical for all organizations to deploy SOA governance as soon as they begin their SOA initiative.

With its acquisition of Mercury and its Systinet division, HP has propelled itself into a leadership position in the SOA governance space. HP is well-positioned to help its customers leverage SOA for IT governance, and more broadly, for corporate governance.

HP, IBM Try to Shift SOA Rollouts Into Higher Gear

Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Baltimore, Maryland-based ZapThink LLC, said, “I think it’s much more helpful to think of it as ‘architecture oriented towards services,’” Schmelzer said.

Schmelzer is of the opinion that HP’s rollout is a sure sign that indicates its is working on the benefits received via the USD 4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive and its Systinet division, which focuses on SOA governance and life cycle management software.

Read more at: SDA India

HP SOA strategy leans toward runtime governance

As unveiled this week, the HP SOA strategy focuses on a combination of products integrating HP OpenView integrated with the technology acquired from Mercury/Systinet to provide governance, quality and management, along with services and education. With a strong and historic reputation in testing, quality control and consulting services, this strategy plays to HP’s strengths, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC.

“Consulting has always been a strength for HP and they have a lot of experience,” Schmelzer said. “They’ve been doing things both on the Java side and the .NET side. HP has a very robust .NET practice, as well as on the SAP and Java side. That is unique. IBM is not really going to offer companies .NET consulting. People mistakenly think of HP as being in the Java camp, but they are much more heterogeneous. They support .NET and Java equally.”

Schmelzer applauded HP’s plan to focus its consultancy on creating SOA centers of excellence within organizations seeking to adopt the architecture, which is in line with the ZapThink position that IT cannot implement SOA simply by buying tools.

“What they’re acknowledging is that the technology part can only help companies so much in their drive to adopt service-oriented architecture,” Schmelzer said. “If you give someone a bunch of technology and say, ‘Go build SOA,’ the rate of success is not that high. HP is not offering an implementation. They are saying, ‘We’re going to help you set up an organizational structure that helps you build your own services.’ It’s a mentorship. It’s helping companies establish a real enterprise architecture group.”

In this sense, Schmelzer said criticism from other vendors that HP is hampered by not having SOA developer tools misses the point.

“I don’t see that as a negative,” Schmelzer said. “Why should HP get into the development picture? They don’t have a runtime environment. They don’t have integration middleware. They don’t have a programming language or a development environment. If you’re HP you don’t care about what runtime environment customers are using. In the context of HP not having development tools is very consistent. If they had something it would actually be very inconsistent. It would be inconsistent for HP to prefer one development environment over another.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

HP: SOA Is Ready for Prime Time

Analyst Ron Schmelzer said whenever he’s confused about what SOA is, he turns the acronym backwards: AOS. “I think it’s much more helpful to think of it as architecture oriented towards services,” said Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

Schmelzer thinks the HP announcement is the first indication of the strategy HP is developing from its US$4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury, which included a company Mercury acquired called Systinet. Mercury specialized in business optimization software and Systinet in SOA governance and lifecycle management software.

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.

Read more at: PC World

The incredible shrinking SOA vendors

“The space is much smaller than it used to be,” observed Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. He added it’s likely to get smaller than it now. “This industry is consolidating very fast. We may find by the end of 2007 another two or three big deals.”

It’s possible that major players including Oracle Corp. and HP will be looking to fill out their SOA product lines. Schmelzer sees the management products of AmberPoint Inc. and the testing products of Mindreef Inc. as potential targets for Oracle. Those two, plus testing vendors Parasoft Corp. and iTKO Inc. might be on HP’s wishlist. As evidenced by the webMethods deal, even larger SOA vendors are not immune. “Who knows,” Schmelzer speculates, “maybe Oracle will pick up Tibco.”

Getting to the bottom line he says, “It’s looking less and less likely that strong independent companies will stay independent.”

The end of this year might also look a little like “Back to the Future” in Schmelzer’s view.

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After a Merger, Time to Digest

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, offered another perspective. “The key to successful integration is to stop thinking in terms of integration altogether. Instead, think in terms of architecture. Integration should be a byproduct of service composition in the context of SOA. It should be something the business does with the capabilities and information at its disposal–not something IT has to do before the business can get any value out of the technology.”

Read more at: SD Times

SOA repositories seen maturing after acquisitions

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, also is impressed by the potential combination of HP and Mercury/Systinet technologies to grow into a mature SOA product offering.

“This deal brings together two clear leaders in the SOA space,” Bloomberg said. “As of today, HP is now the proud owner of Systinet 2, which is now more than a registry or even a repository, but really more of a full-lifecycle SOA governance platform. After all, SOA is all about business technology optimization and the combination of the OpenView product line with Mercury BTO heralds a new era of full-lifecycle IT management for organizations as they progress down their SOA roadmaps.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

HP Blasts Off With Mercury

“SOA is all about business technology optimization, and the combination of the OpenView product line with Mercury BTO heralds a new era of full-lifecycle IT management for organizations as they progress down their SOA roadmaps,” said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg.

Read more at: InternetNews

‘Agentless’ SOA governance unveiled by AmberPoint

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink Inc., said AmberPoint is on the right track with it’s new release, but that other vendors in the SOA governance space are also recognizing the changing capabilities within the infrastructure.

“AmberPoint is one of several vendors recognizing the need for closed loop SOA governance,” the analyst said. He said this “closed loop” trend is leading vendors to recognize “that governance is more than creating policies or even enforcing policies, but also includes policy execution as well as feedback from the runtime environment back to the policy definition and management.”

The analyst said other vendors in the governance space, including SOA Software Inc., WebLayers Inc., Layer 7 Technologies Inc., Mercury Interactive Inc. (now owned by HP) and LogicLibrary Inc., can be expected to release products along similar lines in the coming months.

So while AmberPoint’s announcement is definitely on the right track,” Bloomberg said, “it’s one of a family of offerings that provide for the necessary closed-loop SOA governance.

Read more at: SearchWebServices