HP weaves SOA wares into OpenView

Hewlett-Packard plans to unwrap two new pieces of its OpenView lineup this week. The new software helps IT comply with government regulations and more effectively deliver services using an SOA.

OpenView SOA Manager is built to help organizations run IT operations more like a business through the predictable delivery of services. OpenView Compliance Manager is designed to automate and monitor internal controls and manage business processes while also helping companies comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

“The key to being an adaptive enterprise is an ability to deal with change. We firmly believe you can’t become an adaptive enterprise without some sort of SOA in place that aligns infrastructure with business to deliver services in a timely fashion,” said David Gee, HP’s vice president of marketing.

The new offerings work across middleware residing in multiple heterogeneous environments without catering to any particular platform.

“Because [HP] is not in the middleware market, it means they have to manage whatever the user happens to have. They could not design a product that focuses on their own middleware. The advantage over someone like IBM is they can extract and manage across middleware stacks,” said Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates.

Other analysts said HP needs to present more detail about how IT shops will test their SOA implementations and precisely what is involved in managing their SOA-based development projects.

“The question underneath the covers is what will Global 2000 users have to do to manage SOA development in ways that will let them be proactive and have control over the services they create in the way that they need to,” said Melinda Ballou, principal at consultancy Ballou IT Strategies.

SOA Manager, which takes an agent-based approach to managing multiple environments, supports BEA’s WebLogic and Microsoft’s .Net.

One of the important features of SOA Manager, company officials said, is its ability to manage and integrate the loosely coupled components that make up an SOA.

“You can’t look at an SOA in isolation, because you start with this component architecture with a set of business services. From a business standpoint what it enables, either internally or externally, is to link the right pieces together to meet that business objective without having to rewrite 3 million lines of code,” Hurwitz said.

Through the addition of new “intellectual property,” the OpenView Compliance Manager has been improved to better monitor internal controls, manage business processes, and help ensure companies do not run afoul of compliance regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

 The product helps IT shops gain a better view into IT performance (or the lack thereof), reveal risk indicators, and automate IT controls that improve consistency.