| Abstract: | Company rolls out vertical industry frameworks to give manufacturers, among other segments, a jumpstart in modernizing their business applications. |
Hewlett-Packard Co. this week added another layer to its budding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative by unveiling new industry frameworks designed to help companies adopt and more readily re-architect their business systems.
The initial four frameworks -- for manufacturing and distribution, financial services, network service providers, and public sector industries -- extend HP's consulting services with industry-specific best practices, research, benchmarks, data models, and business processes that will more readily help companies in these sectors assess, design, and implement new SOA architectures. By leveraging its SOA frameworks, HP officials contend, companies can improve communication and information sharing among customers, partners, and colleagues by extracting data locked away in legacy applications and by integrating key business applications.
"HP recognizes that each industry has very specific business and technology requirements to effectively run their operations," said Uday Kumaraswami, vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Applications Practice at HP Services, in a prepared statement. "HP's SOA vertical frameworks are tailored to speed up processes and provide a flexible foundation for continuous improvements in their respective industries."
HP is in good company among industry heavyweights casting their futures around SOA. Leaders such as IBM, SAP AG, Oracle Corp., and Microsoft Corp., among others, are aggressively building out products, toolkits, and consulting services around emerging Web services standards, though some of these companies' approaches are more proprietary than others. Meanwhile, larger corporate enterprises are beginning to put early SOA foundations in place, analysts contend.
SOA is an approach for managing computing environments that uses loosely coupled, reusable, and standards-based services to address changing business needs. The approach is expected to be the next big software paradigm, following the client/server model which took hold in the late 80s and early 90s. International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, MA, forecasts that worldwide spending on external SOA-based services will reach $8.6 billion in 2006, up from $3.6 billion in 2005. By 2010, IDC projects external spending on SOA services to hit more than $33.8 billion on a global basis.
The SOA frameworks are the latest move by HP to capture its share of the SOA pie. The Palo Alto, CA, firm last June announced a series of SOA consulting services and the opening of four worldwide competency centers. The SOA consulting services encompass engagements to help customers do everything from developing an understanding of SOA concepts, through defining and implementing SOA architectures and managing them throughout their lifecycles.
HP last year also announced the HP Modernization Application Services, offerings designed to help customers modernize legacy IT applications as they move to an SOA and Web Services-based environment. On the product side, the company announced the OpenView SOA Manager, a flavor of its OpenView management platform that gives companies control of delivering software as a service.
"HP's SOA story has two parts -- the OpenView software story and the consulting and integration story -- this latest announcement falls into the latter," noted Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC, an industry advisory and analysis firm specializing in SOA, based in Baltimore.
Unlike IBM, whose SOA play is largely centered around its WebSphere middleware, HP is "middleware agnostic," Bloomberg said, which could give it an edge. "HP has partnerships with a number of middleware vendors, including Microsoft Corp. and BEA Systems, and IBM can't say that," he said.
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