HCL Technologies announced the launch of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) Competency Center for Retailers at this week's National Retail Federation Convention. The Competency Center is designed to guide retailers in the areas of SOA tool selection, development methodology and project execution, leveraging an industry-specific set of services and the deep expertise of HCL team members in areas relevant to SOA and BPM.

"SOA and BPM testing are very complex, time-consuming processes due to inadequate, legacy homegrown frameworks," said Vikram Duvvoori, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Middleware & SOA Practice, HCL Technologies. "As they require a fresh perspective towards development, testing, security and other aspects of project life cycle, HCL has focused on accelerating the process for our retail customers through specific tools and technologies for testing and security for SOA applications."

Specifically, one of HCL's solution frameworks, HCL's xFIT, addresses testing and security problems retailers will face when implementing SOA and BPM. With HCL's xFIT framework to manage and automate SOA and services testing, companies can more easily develop, orchestrate and maintain distributed test cases. The framework offers multi-platform support (UNIX, LINUX, AIX and Windows), is lightweight and minimally intrusive, and is also easy to learn and deploy. Furthermore, HCL's xFIT provides companies with the ability to easily run test cases on multiple Systems under Test (SUT) configurations, leading to significant time savings. HCL's xFIT was built by HCL to enable integration testing, and has been successfully deployed in many customer locations to date.

HCL Technologies' Middleware and SOA Practice is comprised of more than 750 professionals with experience in all leading integration technologies and products including SOA, BPM and BAM. The practice focuses on addressing problems for enterprise customers that impact key horizontal business processes such as supply chain visibility, consistent customer experience, partner integration, and identity and provisioning management. HCL consultants are skilled in multiple product sets such as TIBCO, SoftwareAG, SUN JCAPS, Oracle Fusion Middleware, SAP XI/PI, IBM Websphere and Cisco AON. HCL has also executed projects using the SOA Competency Center for customers in Financial Services, Life Sciences and other key vertical markets.