HP: SOA Is Ready for Prime Time
The district created a portal that provides access to students to get their homework, parents to pay their children's various activity fees, and teachers to collaborate. It also provides a service to real estate agents to show what schools are near available houses.
SOA is also a big opportunity for HP rival IBM. At an IBM event in Orlando on Monday, the company announced establishment of SOA certification programs for IT professionals, an online portal of SOA information, and IBM's own set of SOA software and services.
IBM has an advantage over HP in SOA, said Schmelzer, because HP doesn't own a middleware software company. That means HP can provide software and consulting to manage an SOA deployment, but it can't actually run an SOA-based service except by partnering with a middleware provider.
But HP sees itself as a management company, not a middleware company, said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. "They have no intention of becoming a middleware company," she said. HP partners with middleware vendors. By contrast, IBM tries to bundle its middleware product tightly with its SOA offerings, contrary to the reality of data centers that have hardware and software from a variety of vendors.
