HP case study

Everywhere you look – in business and trade publications, at industry conferences, and in vendor meetings – SOA is hot. It’s touted as the type of change IT must make if the enterprise is going to successfully manage and exploit constantly changing business conditions.

HP’s functional view of an SOA takes into account the need to support legacy business systems, heterogeneous platforms, and new functionality in a secure, well managed and governed, flexible environment, ensuring the enterprise benefits from inherent benefits such as distributed computing, code re-use and platform independence. An enterprise can also derive organisation benefits, since the business services are composed from sub-services from throughout IT and the different business units, removing the silo effect that hinders many organisations capability to react quickly. A successful move to SOA requires clear governance, well defined architecture and defined business services, that can be decomposed to loosely coupled services (that promotes re-use) With an SOA in place, we expect that an organization will see an improvement in business & IT alignment – giving an increase in Business agility. The organisation will gain a simplified IT environment through abstraction, re-use and well defined interfaces, it will gain increased visibility into its data, added flexibility for business processes, and more control over business services & systems.

Adoption can be a gradual process

The idea of making architectural change can be daunting, yet so is foregoing the opportunity to confront some serious business challenges. Fortunately you can reap the benefits of SOA without experiencing massive upheaval. The transition to SOA can be gradual change – accomplished through steps that increase business agility without requiring that you move your entire enterprise to SOA in one big bang. Achieving an SOA requires a series of measured changes that gradually transform an IT architecture, placing at its center services that are key to business success. Services that enable the processing of an ATM transaction, for example, or the updating of inventory data, can be used – and reused – for designing, building, and managing components of the distributed computing infrastructure. These composite or sub-services can be used again and again to be composed into different business services, maximising the alignment of IT to the business strategy.

A logical question is Where do I start? Some of our customers are starting to evaluate the potential SOA offers for their organizations. Others are further along in their move to SOA and are ready to devise an enterprise-level SOA strategy. Depending on where you are on the SOA Maturity Continuum (see graphic), HP offers software and services to move you to the next step.

• HP SOA Envisioning helps large enterprises develop an understanding of SOA concepts and identify the benefits and potential effects of SOA on the enterprise.
• HP SOA Assessment utilizes the HP SOA Agility Assessment to help you develop a comprehensive roadmap to guide the adoption of SOA across your enterprise.
• HP SOA Governance and Architecture establishes an SOA Architecture Program Office to oversee enterprise architecture and the SOA governance model as your enterprise is transformed.
• HP SOA Enablement leverages the results of the Governance and Architecture service to prepare your infrastructure for SOA implementation.
• HP SOA Service Development helps you define, develop, and deploy SOA business and IT services across your enterprise, line-of-business, or department, as well as at the project level.
• HP SOA Software Development provides volume and scale in the development and delivery of business and IT services to help you improve productivity from your deployment teams through the use of our global software development capability.
• HP SOA Management helps enterprises establish the control necessary to mitigate the risks and management challenges inherent in a loosely couple architecture to enable businesses to achieve their expected ROI. The foundation of the HP SOA Management service is HP OpenView SOA Manager, as well as other parts of the HP OpenView portfolio.

Now is the time to consider the potential SOA offers your business. Could you benefit from a refocusing of IT spending – shifting from maintenance to innovation, so that IT is better prepared to respond to business requirements? Ever changing regulatory, consolidation, technology, and market requirements demand an agile response that can only occur when IT and business are closely aligned and ready not only react to change but also to take advantage of it. By blurring barriers that have limited the alignment of IT and business, SOA provides the potential for meeting business challenges with greater agility and speed.