In a recent column, I discussed the formation of SOA Link, an interoperability alliance among the top pure-play service-oriented architecture vendors in the industry. That column noted the obvious gap between best-of-breed and stack vendors in SOA Link's membership lineup. An interesting update to that was the announcement on May 15 that HP has also become a founding member.

At first glance, this may look like an unlikely alliance. HP is obviously a heavyweight enterprise management vendor with multiple solutions that span both SOA and non-SOA deployments. In fact, this addition to the alliance makes perfect sense. HP is a leader among vendors leveraging SOA to build commercial-grade software solutions, most notably with its HP OpenView SOA Manager product. From this perspective, HP is well-positioned to pay more than lip service to interoperability - the HP SOA Manager was built to interoperate. HP's ongoing investment in updating its technology turns this alliance into a no-brainer.

In other news, EMA columnist Andi Mann recently wrote about the whys and hows of open source acquisitions. Another twist on the penetration of open source into the marketplace is the use of open source in vendor solutions with the goal of - get this - saving money for customers.

One such example is Heroix, which announced the release of Longitude V3 in late April. V3 is the most recent upgrade to Heroix' flagship application performance monitoring and management solution, introduced in May 2005 and intended to address the marketplace gap between freeware and expensive monitoring products.

Heroix started out in the 1980s with a mainframe monitoring product and eventually added Unix and Windows functionality. However, when the time came to address a changing IT industry with complex heterogeneous applications, Heroix took an unusual step. Instead of trying to extend legacy code to monitor developing technologies, Heroix wrote a new solution from scratch that heavily leveraged open source solutions. While not unheard of, most vendors would rather extend the life of existing solutions than invest in a risky rewrite.

Heroix bundles Longitude V3 with everything required to monitor, manage and report on application performance. Longitude is written in Java, uses Apache Tomcat as its user interface, the MaxDB database, Jasper for reporting, JFreeChart for graphics and Aspirin for mail delivery. Although Heroix tailored some of these products to specific requirements, leveraging open source dramatically reduced development time and kept pricing to very attractive levels. The Longitude V3 Server software is free while the OS Monitors are $299 per box regardless of number of CPUs. A server monitor plus an application monitor runs at $599.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.