HP's big-time SOA entree

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HP/Mercury Merger Is Good For SOA... But Still Missing Some Pieces

Hewlett-Packard recently solidified their enterprise software commitment with its intended $450 billion purchase of Mercury Interactive, a business software producer.

This is a big move for HP into enterprise software, and a strong sign of support from HP for application developers and testers. From a business perspective, an industry leader is taking a strong position on SOA and applying pressure to other pure play hardware, application, and services providers such as IBM, Oracle, and Dell. From a technology perspective, a unique opportunity exists to converge and offer software for end-to-end testing, network monitoring, application management, and governance.

This deal is largely concerning service-oriented architecture (SOA), an increasingly popular?perhaps the most popular?architectural model for enterprise software. It prescribes an approach where loosely-coupled, independent software agents interact using a standardized model.

So, what does this acquisition mean for developers and management staff responsible for SOAs and data center operations? First of all, it securely puts HP on the short list of every SOA architect, developer, and application manager. It also validates the need?and delivers the tools?for data center staff to control and assure the systems that drive the business.

The HP, Mercury, and Systinet combination provides a strong solution for governance, monitoring, and management of SOAs. And this is certainly good news for customers looking to embrace SOA to manage and simplify the complexity in their environments. It?s also a good first step to bridging the gap between operations and development.

So, what is missing? The story has mostly spun around SOA management, registries, and governance, tied, of course, to HP?s core competencies in centralized IT operations and service management. Interestingly, testing was only briefly mentioned in the publicly released information by HP although more than 60 percent of Mercury?s revenue comes from application testing tools. Moreover, this acquisition doesn?t truly provide end to end testing of SOAs.

In this context, end to end SOA and integration testing means a few things:

1) Testing an entire business process path to assure that the integration has resulted in the intended execution of transactions, interactions, and data transformations

2) Testing across multiple platforms, transport protocols, enterprise service busses (ESB), language interfaces, and messages

3) Validating the linkages and integrations between business services and operational systems to meet target defect rates and SLAs

Increasingly today, companies are connecting to customers and suppliers and other third parties via disparate applications designed to work as a single business process through integration and SOA. Without testing at the middleware, ESB, protocol, and message level, how can HP be sure that a SOA and supporting composite applications work as designed? How will HP ensure service level agreements of SOAs without isolated testing and visibility into the variety of moving parts? And what good is a registry of inter-connected and inter-dependent services if they aren?t tested end-to-end? This "behind the screens" testing is needed to maintain the quality of integrated applications, assure service levels, and deliver agility to the business.

The question remains: will HP provide solutions for testing and validation of everything that is happening underneath the SOA or "behind the screens"? It will be interesting to see if HP takes the next step in service management and delivery by combining network monitoring, registries, governance, and application testing tools, with true SOA and integration testing.

The news is encouraging for HP, Mercury, and for end-users of each of these companies. HP and Mercury now provide a strong solution for application, SOA, and network governance and management. It is also encouraging news for vendors like Solstice Software who provide incremental value to HP/Mercury customers via an end to end SOA and integration testing suite.

Chris Benedetto
VP Marketing, Solstice Software
www.solsticesoftware.com

Posted by: cbenedetto   Posted on: 07/28/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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