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Uncovering the Value of SOA

Before the cloak-and-dagger efforts aimed at finding who was leaking board room secrets to the press came to light, the biggest news surrounding Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the resurgence of its PC business.

You may have heard that HP is taking market share from longtime PC sales leader Dell. But did you know that a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is driving HP's recent success in the PC market?

Using an SOA to link a number of previously disconnected applications, HP now claims to be winning at a game Dell invented: selling configure-to-order PCs on the Web.

"We really were behind when it came to selling PCs on the Web," says Terri Schoenrock, executive director of SOA in HP's consulting group. "Moving to SOA changed that."

In addition to making it easier for customers to configure and order PCs online, Schoenrock says, the SOA reduced HP's cost of selling PCs in this manner, further boosting the company's bottom line.

I met Schoenrock at the recent HP Technology Forum, the company's annual user conference, where she was trumpeting HP's strategy for transferring its knowledge about SOA to customers. "We are announcing the opening of three SOA Experience Centers—in Singapore, Cupertino, Calif., and Bangalore, India," she said. "This is part of a $500-million investment HP is making to help customers deploy SOA.

"These centers will allow customers to see how SOA works as they move forward. They will have a chance to understand how services interoperate, and do some sandbox testing" before rolling out SOA-based processes in their own businesses.

The SOA Experience Centers also will showcase how HP's products—its servers, storage systems, and network-management software—fit into an SOA environment. Schoenrock says some HP customers already have seen this in the real world.

For instance, HP helped Belgian steel producer SIDMAR build an SOA that moves real-time production data from manufacturing execution systems at individual plants to a corporate-level business intelligence platform. This infrastructure, built on the Microsoft .NET framework, contains libraries of software components that can be linked in any fashion SIDMAR desires to move information where it needs to go at any given time. The setup has, in effect, given SIDMAR's corporate management around-the-clock access to the status of all production processes. The HP Services group helped SIDMAR build this infrastructure, which also is supported by HP hardware.

But HP isn't the only vendor helping customers transition to SOA. Boston-based AMR Research recently identified SYSPRO as one of several midmarket ERP software vendors helping customers benefit from SOA.

AMR Analyst Dennis Gaughan says some SYSPRO customers he spoke with weren't familiar with the term SOA, but they liked the capabilities embedded in the SYSPRO system that make it easy to extend the core application functionality.