Hewlett-Packard’s Mercury Interactive acquisition has
released an
integrated set of tools that it claims will enable customers to
manage
the whole SOA service lifecycle.
Although the supplier was unwilling to be drawn on how important
the
offerings were likely to become to its business or how much they
might
contribute to its top line, James Stevenson, vice-president and
managing
director for the UK, Middle East and Africa, indicated that the SOA
market
was embryonic but growing.
“The very largest companies are looking at SOA and running
relatively small
pilots, although some are looking at it more strategically. But the
market
is at quite an early stage and the danger is that people rush into
it and
don’t understand the potential pitfalls or the management mess that
can be
created if they’re not conscious of it,” he said.
As a result, Mercury is positioning its offerings as a means of
managing
that lifecycle of services - or small component-based applications
- from
creation and testing through to deploying and monitoring a live
environment.
It has released version 2.0 of the Systinet registry and
repository that it
bought in January this year as the foundation of its efforts. This
handles
service publishing and discovery, policy, contract and
interoperability
management and also includes customisable dashboards.
These enable users to configure views of their SOA environment,
check service
policies and compliance status and track service approvals and
requests.
The software can also generate reports on service lifecycles,
reusability,
consumption, quality and relationship dependencies.
But two new products are Mercury Service Test, which starts at
£5,000 per
seat, and Service Test Management, which starts at £1,900 per
licence,
although a minimum of five needs to be bought. The tools are
integrated with
the registry and can be used to automatically test and manage the
testing
process of software services. The registry can also automatically
generate
test requirements and plans.
Finally, Mercury has enhanced its Mercury Business Availability
Center to
enable customers to manage and monitor web services, application
availability
and web services performance when in a production environment. The
Mercury
Application Mapping element of the product has been integrated into
the
repository to check that all services running in a live environment
are
certified to be there and are not rogue.