HP has decided that the time is right for SOA, so is stepping onto a battlefield currently being dominated by IBM. Unlike Big Blue, however, The Garage will be working with a number of middleware vendors--including Oracle--to deliver its SOA solutions. Its core technology came to HP in last year's $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury and its Systinet technology in July 2006.

HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) for SOA is "an integrated set of software and services designed to help customers address...control over the lifecycle of services creation and reuse, reducing risk, managing services and applications, identifying and resolving SOA-related problems, and utilizing services regardless of the underlying integration platform," HP said in an official statement related to the announcement.

“SOA is entirely transforming the way IT is created, delivered and consumed, providing organizations with a software and systems infrastructure that is more agile and cost-effective and that delivers better business outcomes,” said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP. “HP is committed to providing the tools and expertise customers need to begin adopting SOA successfully. Our open, standards-based approach maximizes the business benefit from their SOA initiatives.”

“A strong governance, quality and management program – addressing the entire service lifecycle from design and development through operations and maintenance – is critically important to a successful SOA initiative,” said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director, Burton Group. “Enterprise-wide SOA systems are likely to encompass heterogeneous computing environments; therefore, organizations should adopt a standards-based, platform-neutral approach to governance, quality and management, and they should keep interoperability high on their list of priorities.”

Incorporating key Systinet governance offerings, "HP’s BTO for SOA helps customers establish a practical, flexible and incremental approach for deploying SOA governance, quality and management across their organizations," the company said. HP SOA Systinet 2.51 software includes new lifecycle management and workflow capabilities that improve service controls. Extended capabilities for policy management configuration for SOA include new integrations among HP SOA products to enable enterprise-wide policy management from design time to enforcement and run time.