HP announced a comprehensive set of service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance software and services to help companies accelerate SOA adoption and drive increased business value while reducing potential risks, such as service disruption to the business.

In addition, HP announced the expansion of its Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF), one of the industry’s first and most broadly adopted industry specifications for SOA governance interoperability. The framework deepens HP’s support for heterogeneous customer environments.

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 quickly aligned to changing business needs.

Companies today are faced with the proliferation of SOA services, which can cause increased risk and costly disruption to the business. Organizations use SOA governance processes, policies and software to gain visibility and control of ad hoc services that do not meet compliance standards and business requirements or to enable the consistent reuse of business services throughout an enterprise.

“Effective SOA governance requires customers to establish a system of record that provides visibility into the services in their SOA environment, create a relationship of trust between providers and consumers of services, and secure control over which services are built and released into the production environment,” said Avrami Tzur, vice president, SOA, HP. “We are committed to providing industry-leading SOA governance solutions to drive better business outcomes for our customers.”

HP was recently positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in Gartner’s evaluation of the SOA Governance market in a report titled “Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets, 2007.”

New HP SOA Services
New HP Validation and Implementation Services for SOA Governance, Performance and Quality help companies accelerate delivery of SOA services, reduce risk and maximize reuse of SOA services.

With the new Validation and Implementation Service for SOA Governance, HP consultants help customers validate a set of SOA services by implementing a governance model using HP SOA Systinet software. The new Validation Service for SOA Performance helps predict, measure and optimize performance of SOA applications and infrastructure. HP’s new Validation Service for SOA Quality establishes processes for managing the business risk of SOA-enabled services.

HP also introduced new services to install and configure HP SOA Systinet and HP SOA Manager to enable a quicker return on a customer’s software investment.

Additionally available is a new suite of SOA education and training courses that help customers translate SOA concepts into effective, governable service-based solutions. These new services enhance the HP SOA Center of Excellence Services, enabling customers to apply the concepts of governance to organizational and process structure.

“SOA Governance is critical for Delta as we move toward SOA adoption,” said Melanee Haywood, vice president, Engineering & Common Services, Delta Airlines. “The implementation of an HP SOA Center of Excellence has accelerated our efforts and has provided an excellent foundation for our SOA Governance initiative and our SOA program overall.”

New HP SOA Governance Software
The newest release of HP SOA Systinet software delivers complete design and run-time governance of SOA services, as well as service lifecycle management through an enhanced integration with HP SOA Manager.

HP SOA Systinet also enables developers to proactively check services against policies through a new Eclipse-based policy validation plug-in. This will ensure services conform to business and IT requirements before they are published for consumption. HP SOA Systinet software supports significantly enhanced graphical navigation, advanced reporting, customizable searching and expanded service lifecycle support. This ensures better enterprise-level SOA governance.

Also available now, the HP SOA Registry Foundation is a new software product expressly designed for independent software vendors. HP SOA Registry Foundation is a powerful, standards-based way to publish, categorize and discover SOA services and artifacts. This new product can be easily embedded with packaged applications and distributed solutions.

“HP is delivering highly comprehensive SOA governance solutions including software and services,” said Kris Zywicki, enterprise architect, Dow Corning, a global leader in silicon-based technology and innovation. “The power of that approach is that it can accelerate adoption while providing necessary safeguards to the business. HP’s products give us the visibility, trust and control we need for our SOA projects.”

HP Governance Interoperability Framework
The HP Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) is expanding with 10 new partners: Active Endpoints, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, JackBe, Layer7 Technologies, LogicLibary, Nexaweb, Oracle, Sonoa Systems and Vordel. GIF simplifies the exchange of information between HP SOA Systinet software, which acts as a system of record, and third-party technologies.

HP also will make the GIF specifications publicly available at hp.com and Wikipedia. GIF partner support will be expanded through the Enterprise Management Alliance Program, which provides extensive technical and marketing resources.

More information regarding today’s news is available in an online press kit at www.hp.com/go/soagovernance. More information about the HP SOA portfolio is available at www.hp.com/go/SOA.