HP extends quality and management software to meet new requirements for mainstream SOA adoption

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.

For SOA to be broadly adopted and deliver business value, an entire organization must have confidence that the services it provides function correctly, scale as demand increases and meet operational requirements.

To make certain that services meet all functional and performance objectives and are ready for production deployment, HP introduced new versions of its market-leading SOA testing products, HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management.

"Customers who want to scale their SOA-based deployments recognize they must make SOA a seamless part of their quality and management infrastructure to support business requirements," said Mahmoud Mounir, Software Director, HP Middle East.

"HP delivers an integrated solution that includes SOA governance, quality and management. Our modular approach gives customers the confidence to quickly progress from initial SOA pilots through to enterprise-scale deployments."

In addition, HP announced new SOA management capabilities with HP Business Availability Center for SOA, HP Diagnostics for SOA and HP SOA Policy Enforcer that together better monitor services in production, resolve operational issues and deal with changes to services.
These software products accelerate enterprise SOA adoption by providing assurances that services meet or exceed design and operational specifications. By integrating these solutions across the complete service lifecycle of planning, quality and operations, customers have confidence that services can be trusted to support critical business applications without risk of failure or performance degradation.

HP Quality Management for SOA

HP's Quality Management solutions for SOA give enterprises the assurance that services will function reliably in any deployment environment. New capabilities to these solutions include:

• HP Service Test Management - enables quality assurance teams to plan, design and execute quality management activities from a service-oriented perspective. HP Service Test Management allows teams to instantly report on the pre-production quality of all SOA-based services. It also integrates with HP SOA Systinet to automatically use quality management metrics to alert managers and users that services are ready for consumption.

• HP Service Test - enables functional testing of SOA services to reduce the risk of application failures. Testing is fully integrated with HP's extended software portfolio to ensure ongoing quality and management across the service lifecycle.

HP SOA management

HP's SOA management solutions will work standalone for small SOA projects or large-scale deployments and fully integrate with enterprise IT management capabilities. This flexibility gives SOA architects the confidence that initial SOA project efforts will be embraced by IT operations groups as services adoption increases.

New capabilities to HP SOA Management products include:

• HP Business Availability Center (BAC) for SOA - a module of HP's real-time business service and application management solution built for the challenges of SOA. It manages shared services seamlessly within the existing operational infrastructure and processes used by IT. This reduces the risk of deploying services by making sure they are actively managed using proven processes and technologies. HP BAC for SOA also provides problem resolution before services affect consumers and business processes.

• HP Diagnostics for SOA - allows technical SOA teams to drill down into the behavior of their shared services to quickly identify and resolve problems before they impact customers. It works either standalone for SOA projects or integrates seamlessly into BAC for SOA for enterprise management.

• HP SOA Policy Enforcer - bridges the gap between operational SOA management and run-time SOA governance. It provides the assurance that services are meeting technical and business requirements by actively monitoring and enforcing security, performance and other operational requirements. Performance monitoring data is fed directly into HP Diagnostics for SOA for comprehensive analysis.

HP's SOA enablement solution offerings provide best practices and new products for automating the SOA governance, quality and management processes required for successful SOA adoption. HP also provides services to speed the creation of both SOA strategy and development. HP's approach supports the heterogeneous nature of technology organizations and enables customers to effectively institute SOA solutions regardless of the underlying applications, platforms and infrastructure already in place.