HP enhancing SOA products in mainstream effort

Seeking to enhance mainstream SOA deployments, HP is increasing SOA quality management capabilities Tuesday in several products.

The rollout serves as an extension of the HP Business Technology Optimization for SOA portfolio. Featured are 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, formerly called HP SOA Manager.

"[The products are] really designed to bring SOA into the mainstream of what IT is doing," said Kelly Emo, HP SOA product manager. Customers are rolling out SOA projects but are struggling with bringing SOA solutions into quality assurance organizations using tools already in place, she said.

Service Test and Service Test Management work with HP Quality Center, which is HP's management portfolio. Service Test Management 9.9.3 enables quality assurance teams to execute quality management activities from a service-oriented perspective, HP said. Change impact analysis can be done at the service and consumer levels. Individual operations inside of a service also can be examined, such as a Web service that looks up a customer ID and takes and order.

Teams can report on the pre-production quality of SOA services. The product integrates with HP SOA Systinet to use quality management metrics to alert that services can be consumed.

Service Test 9.12 provides functional testing of SOA services to reduce the risk of application failures, the company said. New capabilities include expanded support for such standards as SOAP over Java Message Service, WS-Addressing, and SAML.

Business Availability Center for SOA manages shared services within operational infrastructure and processes. Proactive problem resolution is provided.

Diagnostics for SOA allows SOA teams to drill down into the behavior of shared services to resolve problems before customers are impacted. Problem resolution has been added for infrastructure, such as ESBs and SOAP stacks, and users are given assistance in improving performance and meeting service-level agreements.

SOA Policy Enforcer provides assurances that services are meeting technical and business requirements, HP said. Performance monitoring data is fed into Diagnostics for SOA for analysis.

SOA Policy Enforcer is a repackaging of HP SOA Manager focused on runtime policy enforcement. Capabilities have been added for security policy. Monitoring capabilities previously associated with the product have been moved into Business Availability Center.

The SOA products are available in June.