Prepress
HP Extends Quality and Management Software to Meet New Requirements for Mainstream SOA Adoption
Wednesday 30. April 2008 - HP today introduced new and enhanced quality and management software designed to increase the success of mainstream deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA) by businesses.
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 Tim Hall, director of SOA products, Software, HP. “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.
“As SOA becomes an increasingly mainstream approach to enterprise architecture, HP continues to offer governance, quality and management products that form essential SOA infrastructure,” said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at SOA advisory firm ZapThink. “HPs new SOA testing and management products provide the framework enterprises require to ensure IT delivers production-ready services that can support business-critical applications and processes, making it easier for Quality Management and Operations groups to support SOA-based applications while leveraging existing IT investments and talent.”
HP Quality Management for SOA
HPs 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 HPs extended software portfolio to ensure ongoing quality and management across the service lifecycle.
HP SOA management
HPs 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 HPs 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.
“In our heterogeneous SOA environment, it is essential that we are able to automate the governance process with seamless integration with the testing and deployment of services,” said David Lindley, enterprise architect, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. “This is especially critical as we scale up our development of services and move from a bottom up to a top down approach.”
HPs 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. HPs 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.