"It's time for SOA to come out of the prototype stage and move into the mainstream," said Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP, in an online presentation by the company.

SOA is still an abstraction to some. It's architecture to design services based on loosely coupled interactions between different types of software, so that services can be developed in a modular form. Companies can use and reuse different common elements of design for each new service, whether it's for Web commerce, call-center operation or managing an employee benefits plan.

Analyst Ron Schmelzer said whenever he's confused about what SOA is, he turns the acronym backwards: AOS. "I think it's much more helpful to think of it as architecture oriented towards services," said Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink.

Schmelzer thinks the HP announcement is the first indication of the strategy HP is developing from its US$4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury, which included a company Mercury acquired, called Systinet. Mercury specialized in business optimization software and Systinet in SOA governance and lifecycle management software.

HP listed three steps to implementing SOA:

• Governance: SOA Systinet 2.51 software is a policy management system for services throughout their lifecycle, which can be reused rather than re-created each time a new service is created.

• Quality: HP Change Impact Testing and Business Process Testing software to test proposed new services before they are deployed.

• Management: HP Business Availability Center software helps monitor and manage a service once it's deployed. HP Services also shares best SOA practices with clients.

Thomson Financial uses HP SOA to provide information to the financial services industry. Some managers initially had trouble embracing the concept, said Vladimir Mitevski, a vice president of product management for Thomson.

"When we went to the senior management and started talking about SOA, I confused these people left and right," Mitevski said.

But because SOA enables one person to deploy a new service instead of 20, and the task can be accomplished in hours instead of weeks, management could see the return on investment, he said.

SOA helps the Anoka-Hennepin school district in Minnesota deliver a variety of Web-based services to students, parents and staff, said Patrick Plant, director of technology and information services at the school district.