HP: You’re late, but welcome to the party

HP announced yesterday that it is trying to extend governance beyond just the registry as a best practice for its customers – an approach that we, who pioneered automated SOA governance, have been taking for years.

The earlier you catch issues in the lifecycle, the more time and money you’ll save. It’s nice that HP is providing a simple Eclipse plug-in to inspect XML artifacts during development, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg .To fully automate SOA Governance you need a policy management solution that governs across all of the various IT infrastructure – spanning IDEs, source control systems, build systems, asset management systems, registries/repositories and beyond. And it is not just XML artifacts but all the various assets created including design documents, source code, assemblies, XML and Web Services.

I’m sure it will also be some time until HP realizes that every large enterprise has infrastructure from vendors other than HP that need to be governed as well. Most of WebLayers customers are also HP Systinet users and figured out very quickly that policy management and enforcement needs to extend beyond just the registry. This is a common affliction for infrastructure companies that have many hammers, and they are searching for the nails to drive with them. It's not about the technology that I can sell you, it's about the business objectives that I can enable and support for you.

Having said all that I am glad to see HP has finally seen the light about the importance of a more comprehensive approach to design-time governance, as it will help bring attention to an important industry trend focused on making sure that you are actually building your SOA in support of your business objectives. I've seen too many HP Systinet implementations that are populated with poorly constructed services that fail to deliver on the promise of SOA. I think it's about time that HP starts to talk about how to best avoid the problem of ‘Garbage in, Garbage out’.