The extended SOA Portfolio features both enhanced, new products and services

Apr 29, 2008 14:54 GMT  ·  By

Hewlett Packard is on its way to increase SOA quality management capabilities in several products on Tuesday, as the company is looking forward to enhance mainstream SOA deployments. The enhancements are part of HP's strategy of extending its Business Technology Optimization for SOA portfolio.

The project includes upgraded versions of SOA testing products HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management as well as new management capabilities in HP Business Availability for SOA, HP Diagnostics for SOA, and HP SOA Policy Enforcer, also known as HP SOA Manager.

Kelly Emo, HP SOA product manager, said that these products are designed "to bring SOA into the mainstream of what IT is doing." She also said that customers are release SOA projects and that they are struggling at the same time to bring SOA solutions into quality assurance organizations using tools already consecrated.

Service Test and Service Test Management are directly connected to HP Quality Center, that is HP's management portfolio in fact. The company said that quality assurance teams are enabled to execute quality management activities from a service-oriented perspective through the use of Service Test Management 9.9.3. The service and consumer levels allow change impact analysis to be performed. The examination of individual operations inside of a service can also be possible, for example the examination of a Web service that searches for a customer ID and takes and order.

The pre-production quality of SOA services has also been given more attention. HP SOA Systinet is a part of the product that focuses on the use of quality management metrics to alert on what services can be released for consumers. According to HP, Service Test 9.12 offers functional testing of SOA services that will also help reducing the risk of application failures. SOAP over Java Message Service, WS-Addressing, SAML, and other standards provided with extended support are included among the new capabilities of the product.

Business Availability Center for SOA has the ability to manage shared services within operational infrastructure and processes. Along with this, proactive problem resolution is included in the service. SOA teams will be able to analyze into detail the behavior of shared services based on diagnostics for SOA. This will help the teams resolve problems before customers become aware of them. The problem resolution featured has been added to consolidate the infrastructure, such as ESBs and SOAP stacks. Users are provided with assistance in improving performance and meeting service-level agreements.

About the SOA Policy Enforcer Hewlett Packard said that it has been designed to assure that services meet all technical and business requirements. Diagnostics for SOA gathers all the performance monitoring data and performs the analysis.

HP SOA Manager has been redesigned and transformed into SOA Policy Enforcer, which is focused on runtime policy enforcement. The new service features new capabilities which have been added for security policy. Business Availability Center features HP SOA Manager's former capabilities focused on monitoring activities.

The company announced that it would make its SOA products available in June.