GOVERNMENT
HP Opens Three Experience Centers as Part of $500 Million Investment in SOA
HP today unveiled three facilities in Cupertino, California, Singapore and Bangalore, India, as part of a $500 million investment to deliver world-class service-oriented architecture (SOA) to customers. Introduced at the HP Technology Forum, the three HP SOA Competency Centers are comprehensive experience centers enabling HP, its customers and its partners to pilot and evaluate SOA technologies, solutions and implementations. The centers will also showcase HP’s capabilities in IT architecture, management, security and governance. SOA is an approach to delivering IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected, reusable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs. HP’s SOA offering, supported by the new centers and a key component of HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy, takes advantage of leading infrastructure technology to deliver IT as a service, building towards an automated, 24x7, “lights-out” computing environment. The opening of the three SOA Competency Centers brings HP’s total to five worldwide, with two additional centers located in Sophia Antipolis, France, and Tokyo. “HP delivers top-to-bottom SOA offerings,” said Deborah Nelson, senior vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP. “These centers allow customers around the world to experience first-hand how to apply HP’s extensive SOA capabilities to real-world business challenges and reach their competitive or organizational goals.” Gartner, an industry analyst firm, estimates that by 2010 at least 65 percent of large enterprise organizations will have more than 35 percent of their application portfolios SOA-based, up from fewer than five percent of organizations in 2005. “The growing interest in composite applications and, in particular, composite applications developed with SOA, stems from the potential of establishing applications that are more flexible [and] provide the agility required to compete in today’s competitive environment,” according to Gartner. Several new HP SOA customers, including Edogawa City, located at the eastern edge Tokyo, are in the process of implementing an SOA into their IT environment to develop new business capabilities at a lower cost, while capitalizing on the need to respond to change. “We believe that an SOA solution from HP will empower our city to achieve a better overall return on our IT investments,” said Hirosumi Matsuo, director, Information Policy Section, Edogawa City, Tokyo. “This new architecture will provide a more unified, efficient IT platform to optimize our business applications and heighten operational efficiency.” More information about HP Technology Forum 2006 is available at its Web site.