HP, SAP cosy up on SOA

HP will provide new services to help SAP customers move to enterprise SOA, reports InfoWorld. The report notes that nearly half of all global SAP installations run on HP hardware.

"The services are designed to help very large global SAP customers as they migrate from older versions of the vendor's R/3 applications to the newer SOA-focused mySAP versions," says Tim Treat, manager of worldwide packaged applications for enterprise applications services at HP.

Such a migration is highly complex, involving not only the upgrading of software, but also refreshing of servers and storage to support the new applications, he said.

Ettienne Reinecke, Dimension Data's group technology officer, estimates it may take a decade for SOA to be fully adopted by the majority of the industry.

In a ComputerWorld piece on hindrances to SOA adoption, Reinecke is quoted as saying there has been a "variety of interpretations" among vendors on what SOA is and what companies will need.

"In the last 12 months, SOA has started to gain traction," he says. "Cisco has a couple of elements, and Active Directory is gaining wide adoption as the de facto directory standard."

Although the enterprise service bus (ESB) market was all a flutter in 2006, it has brought little to no clarification to the category, says Ronan Bradley, analyst at a research company, on EbizQ.

"Throughout my tenure at PolarLake, I believed there was a need for complex integration middleware to implement an SOA.

"This is a view which has now become generally accepted (it certainly wasn't the case back in 2001 when we started); and the enterprise service bus would be the title used for the complete stack of middleware required. It appears the industry is speaking or at least mumbling with different voices on this one."