5 Things HP Needs to do to make an Impact in the SOA Market

As we saw last week HP has tossed its hat into the SOA market, and is ready to do battle with the likes of Tibco, IBM, and Oracle.

“HP has decided that the time is right for SOA, so is stepping onto a battlefield currently being dominated by IBM. Unlike Big Blue, however, The Garage will be working with a number of middleware vendors–including Oracle–to deliver its SOA solutions. Its core technology came to HP in last year’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury and its Systinet technology in July 2006.”

So, they have a SOA governance tool, a SOA testing tool, and a good track record in the system management world. So, what else is missing? How about a TLA (three letter acronym)…BTO.

“HP’s Business Technology Optimization (BTO) for SOA is ‘an integrated set of software and services designed to help customers address…control over the lifecycle of services creation and reuse, reducing risk, managing services and applications, identifying and resolving SOA-related problems, and utilizing services regardless of the underlying integration platform,’ HP said in an official statement related to the announcement.”

The issue here is that HP is rather big, and their SOA offering is rather small, with others providing more in their stacks. However, the governance tool that HP now owns is first rate, and that’s a good foundation for other synergistic products and an overall strategy. Here are a few things they can do to make a larger impact in a market, now that it’s moving faster and faster.

1. The most important issue is the creation of a very detailed SOA product technology strategy that defines both problem patterns and solutions patterns, using the HP SOA technology. Moreover, be honest about what’s missing, and thus has to be augmented either though a partnership with another SOA technology, say development, and what HP plans on buying or building in the future. Some of this is public, some of this is not.
2. Once the strategy is complete, it’s time to define the stack roadmap. Not product roadmaps, but a detailed plan that shows the maturation of the product over time and the interdependencies with other products in the portfolio, hopefully increasing. Moreover, link this back to step 1.
3. Be unique in the offering, perhaps providing a SOA governance repository with examples of best practices already populated. Thus, SOA practitioners don’t have to start from scratch. Or, perhaps a directory of Internet delivered services, thus saving the practitioner for having to find them and enter them.
4. Provide a good SOA modeling tool. Nobody has one of those yet…I’m still looking.

5. Become the best at leading thought around SOA. IBM does a good job in providing key information around SOA concepts. However, I’m talking about step-by-step guides, such as “when your domain looks like this, use this approach and technology.” Practitioners are starving for guidance out there, vendors who provide it will lead the market eventually.