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Hewlett-Packard is again building on its SOA story—and working hard to appeal to companies that may be ready to implement a services-based architecture. The company announced April 11 four new service-oriented architectures geared toward vertical industries: financial services, manufacturing and distribution, the public sector, and telecommunications.
Over the past year, HP has announced a number of initiatives relating to SOA, including its Open View-based SOA services announced in June of last year, its Peregrine acquisition to gain SOA management capabilities in September, its application modernization services announced in November and its middleware partnership with Oracle announced in February of this year.
“We will be making more SOA services and software announcements,” said Terri Schoenrock, director and global managing principal with the Enterprise Application Services Program Office of HP Services Consulting & Integration, in Palo Alto, Calif. “Well be doing more in software, more in services and more in vertical frameworks.”
The SOA reference architectures are targeted at those industries HP said it believes are ready to adopt SOA methodologies.
Overall, the frameworks are designed to enable companies to more quickly integrate applications, and be more nimble in responding to changing business opportunities (which is pretty much the SOA motto).
According to Schoenrock, each framework is built around a few fundamentals: industry capabilities, HPs own intellectual property and its approach to SOA. Where appropriate, the frameworks bring in partner capabilities and map out consulting and integration services.
The intellectual property has been culled from multiple levels in the company. “There is a bunch that is actual code, a bunch that [are] service delivery kits—how to, when to, what to—and service delivery kit templates that deliver methodology,” Schoenrock said. “There are also tools around enabling technologies.”
For the financial services industry, HP is offering Open Bank and Open Payments, separate frameworks that are designed to use an SOA approach to ease banks channel application integration woes.
HPs Manufacturing and Distribution Industries framework is designed to help manufacturers implement collaborative manufacturing strategies, tapping software capabilities from BEA Systems, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
The e-government framework is geared toward modernizing public sector agencies business processes by helping them to deliver online services to customers that are able to rely on existing IT implementations.
HP has developed two frameworks for network and service providers. The Service Delivery Platform is a blueprint of standards-based software, tools, hardware, and consulting and integration services. The idea is to help service delivery platform operators integrate network elements and gateways.
At the same time, the HP Integrated Service Management framework integrates operations and business support systems for carriers and operators.
HP is not going it alone on its SOA path. The company has named five key partners that it will work with to facilitate its customers functionality integration: Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, BEA Systems, and JBoss on the open-source front.
“Since we announced our first initiative in June weve added 2,000 new customers to SOA, some HP already had, some new, some through acquisitions,” Schoenrock said. “Customers came to us for a few reasons. Were more collaborative, with capabilities across partners.”