HP opens SOA centres

HP has unveiled three facilities in Cupertino (in California, USA), Singapore and Bangalore, as part of a $500 million investment to deliver service-oriented architecture (SOA) to its enterprise customers.

The three HP SOA competency centres should help evangelise customers and partners to pilot and evaluate SOA technologies, solutions and implementations. The centres will also showcase HP’s capabilities in IT architecture, management, security and governance.

SOA is an approach to delivering IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected reusable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs.

HP’s SOA offering, supported by the newly launched centres and a key component of HP’s adaptive enterprise strategy, takes advantage of its infrastructure technology to deliver IT as a service, building towards an automated, 24x7, “lights-out” computing environment. The opening of the three SOA competency centres brings HP’s total to five worldwide, with two additional centres located in Sophia Antipolis (France), and Tokyo (Japan).

Gartner estimates that by 2010 at least 65 percent of large enterprises will have more than 35 percent of their application portfolios SOA-based, up from fewer than five percent of organisations in 2005.