HP makes SOA mgmt. play

HP has been making a lot of acquisition noise, most recently with purchases of AppIQ, Peregrine Systems and RLX Technologies. According to Mark Potts, the company's CTO in charge of the Management Software Business, the buys will help HP deliver to customers the tools to manage leading-edge technologies, including services-oriented architecture applications. Potts recently met with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie to talk about how HP management software can arm network managers with the tools to optimize application performance. NOTE: You can also listen to the interview in MP3 format.

Tell me about your background before HP.

I was originally the chief technology officer and founder at Talking Blocks. When the acquisition went through [in 2003], we were very much focused on the vision that we had for the Talking Blocks portfolio. When we met with HP, we had a vision around where SOA was going to add advantage to most IT shops in terms of application delivery, development and configuration. That was something we wanted to be able to organize and manage across its entire life cycle at HP.

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HP has been making a lot of acquisition noise, most recently with purchases of AppIQ, Peregrine Systems and RLX Technologies. According to Mark Potts, the company's CTO in charge of the Management Software Business, the buys will help HP deliver to customers the tools to manage leading-edge technologies, including services-oriented architecture applications. Potts recently met with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie to talk about how HP management software can arm network managers with the tools to optimize application performance. NOTE: You can also listen to the interview in MP3 format.

Tell me about your background before HP.

I was originally the chief technology officer and founder at Talking Blocks. When the acquisition went through [in 2003], we were very much focused on the vision that we had for the Talking Blocks portfolio. When we met with HP, we had a vision around where SOA was going to add advantage to most IT shops in terms of application delivery, development and configuration. That was something we wanted to be able to organize and manage across its entire life cycle at HP.

What is your role now at HP?

Once I got here, it was an understanding of how those changes in the market, around people moving toward a service-oriented architecture, would change the requirements around enterprise management and how we could maximize the benefits around SOA leveraging our portfolio and what else would be needed around that end-to-end management around SOA. As we broadened out and made more acquisitions, the management software business itself, being as strategic as it is toward their Adaptive Enterprise strategy, HP wanted a CTO in charge.

What does HP focus on in terms of SOA management?

There are really three areas that we concentrate on: SOA as a way in which we integrate and deliver services from IT; also a way in which we can automate management activities around the full life cycle of SOA in which we talk about model-based automation; and then finally how virtualization fits in that picture.

What type of virtualization?

You can think of virtualization at the hardware level or the infrastructure level - that's virtual machines or storage-area networks. But virtualization is really all the way up the stack. Web services and SOA are about virtualized applications in many ways so they can be changed in line with business processes.

How has HP customer perception of SOA changed over the past 12 months?

The change that has really happened over the last six to 12 months is that people have realized that the value around an open standards-based integration technology, such as Web services, only gets you so far. The real value is around SOA, which is a lot more than a protocol set for integration. For that, customers are starting to understand that there needs to be some other services around the delivery and integration as well as the management of SOA. That's probably one of the biggest changes I've seen. Customers are moving toward a more full-blown SOA initiative, and they understand there are many aspects of managing that beyond traditional resource management.