HP, Oracle Sign SOA Deal

Hoping to bolster each other's strategy around service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Hewlett-Packard today is announcing a joint effort with Oracle to integrate Oracle's Fusion Middleware into its SOA portfolio.

By better leveraging Oracle's "hot pluggable" middleware, HP officials believe it can help users more fully automate a range of business processes, integrate disparate data and applications, and deploy SOAs.

Some of HP's SOA-based services that will take advantage of Fusion, as well as HP's OpenView management software, include the company's complete life-cycle methodology, risk-managed start-up, proof-of-concept services and several end-to-end solution capabilities.

With Fusion built completely on open standards, Oracle officials believe its middleware can be smoothly integrated with the offerings of dozens of products from competitors and other business partners.

"Because we depend 100 percent on open standards, we can interoperate with almost all technologies people have in their environments," says John Gawkowski, vice president of business development and partner technical services at Oracle's Server Technology division. "The idea is to provide tightly integrated products from Oracle that have a solid SOA foundation. If you want to use another technology, it will be pluggable."

Today's announcement builds on the two companies' Optimize for Agility initiative first unveiled in October 2005, along with the plan to expand the Oracle grid-computing reference architectures to incorporate Oracle Fusion Middleware and SOA Suite.

"Companies can preserve legacy systems by exposing them as business assets without the need for replacement or significant modifications, while at the same time facilitating the ability to develop new and lower-cost business capabilities," says Uday Kumaraswami, vice president of HP Services' Enterprise Applications Practice.

In a related announcement, officials from both companies said they plan to deliver a fully integrated technology stack designed to let users and VARs based in the Americas to build and manage SOAs.