HP tightens up its SOA governance proposition
HP yesterday
announced long-awaited (at least as far as we are concerned) enhancements to its SOA software and services, which see the company beginning to realise the potential of its acquisition of Systinet (via Mercury) when it comes to SOA governance. Back in March, the other Neil
highlighted that lifecycle management is one of the four key elements of an SOA functionality pyramid and is:
all about supporting development, integration and operations teams in linking their efforts to ensure that the consumer service experience is high-quality and consistent under potentially unpredictable circumstances. Typically the foundation of this capability is some kind of registry/repository, but ideally tools go further than this - firstly by helping to automate team workflows for implementing quality controls at design time; and secondly by helping to translate design intentions relating to operational SLAs into runtime policies which are tied into the infrastructure.
HP is attempting to go that bit further by more tightly integrating the registry/respository capabilities it acquired with Systinet to the policy-based management and monitoring capabilities of its SOA Manager product. Whilst HP also brings other valuable functionality to fill out the SOA pyramid, including business process monitoring (HP Process Insight), security and identity management (HP Select Access) and synthetic transaction monitoring and reporting (HP Business Availability Center) it does not - and nor would it claim to - have everything.
Enter the Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF) it inherited from Systinet. The GIF is designed to facilitate information exchange with the Systinet Registry and Repository allowing third parties to integrate relevant technologies, such as policy enforcement and service orchestration, with the SOA lifecycle management capabilities. As well as announcing 10 new GIF partners, HP is also publishing the GIF specifications.
Integration is not totally reliant on GIF though. Systinet's registry is also embedded in the SOA infrastructure offerings from the likes of BEA, Oracle and TIBCO, which makes HP an obvious potential source of broader SOA lifecycle management functionality for their customers. The company is not such an obvious choice for customers of IBM and Software AG who are building out their own capabilities.
SOA platforms do not begin and end with BEA, IBM, Oracle, Software AG and TIBCO though. There are other choices: Microsoft, Progress, Red Hat and SAP etc. Not forgetting of course that organisations will be acquiring service oriented solutions as part of business applications. What's the story there? There are two. The first is GIF. The second is the HP SOA Registry Foundation that also formed part of yesterday's announcement and which the company describes as
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.
In other words, it's an OEM-specific version of the registry designed to allow HP to replicate the BEA, Oracle and TIBCO agreements.
Coupled with the HP's services capabilities, these announcements should mean that HP is able to exploit its systems management heritage and installed base to position itself as a credible SOA lifecycle management provider to organisations moving beyond project-level SOA initiatives - and to the software vendors that are helping them on that journey.
Labels: governance, HP, service, SOA, UDDI
Little SOA vs Big SOA
During our "off air" preamble with Miko Matsumura prior to recording
our podcast earlier this week, he mentioned that he likes MWD's focus on "Big SOA".
I'd never thought of what we tell customers about SOA in this way before, but it's true that we try and get people thinking about how SOA can help them transform their organisations in the long term by pushing the boundaries of SOA and not sticking with an overly-technical, bottom-up approach that sees SOA as "EAI with standards". So Miko got me thinking about what, precisely, "Big SOA" might be and how it might be different from something that for the sake of argument we might call "little SOA".
So I came up with a picture:
As the picture shows, I think the difference between "little" and "big" SOA comes down to how you look at the "S" and the "A" of SOA.
In "little SOA" (bottom left of the picture), organisations have a software development centric view of what a "service" is. A service is basically a standalone software component with some kind of remotely addressable invocation interface (let's say a WS-* interface for now). In "little SOA" organisations have a similarly narrow view of what "architecture" is - architecture is basically
software design with a corner office.
In "big SOA" (top right of the picture), organisations have a much broader view of what a "service" is. In this broader view a service isn't something you build; it's something that is experienced by a consumer. This view, therefore, is really about realising that delivering a service requires all sorts of IT competencies (design, development, integration, testing, deployment, admin, ops and change management) to be integrated together across the lifecycle of an investment that is packaged up as a service. That's a very different perspective on "service" that is not coincidentally much closer to what a business exec would think of if you asked them what a "service" is. In big SOA organisations also have a broader view of what architecture is about. Architecture isn't an inwardly-focused IT competence that seeks to make global optimisations to portfolios of software development projects. It's an outwardly-focused business-IT communication competence that seeks to further understanding of IT within business, and of business within IT.
I don't have hard quantitative data to back this up, but based on anecdotal evidence of customer conversations my feeling is that the majority of companies considering or starting out with SOA are doing "little SOA".
What do you think?
Labels: architecture, service, SOA
