HP has just announced
its Service Delivery Platform 2.0, a SOA bundle aimed at telcos. The
interesting parts are its intended applications, and how similar the
telcos are to other enterprises.
The SDP itself is a customized version of the same SOA products
that HP sells to enterprises -- namely management (from Mercury) and
governance (from Systinet), plus other tools developed in-house.
Notably absent is an ESB or other messaging backbone, but HP paints
this as a plus, saying most customers already have one.
That's true in the case of large telcos, and increasingly it's
true for others users as well, thanks to commoditization and open
source. Of course, customers who already have an ESB also are more
likely to have many of the other features that HP is hawking, so it
needs to add something more.
For most customers, this means consulting and integration
services. The most interesting is its SOA
Maturity Assessment calculator, a free tool that tries to
quantify an organization's SOA technology, comparing it against
others in the same industry.
For telcos, the SDP is aimed in particular at mobile operators.
The plan is that they can use SOA to expose Web services that can be
the used by RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) on cell phones. On its
own, this isn't a particularly new idea: the wireless Web always was supposed to be about more than static Web pages (WAP was the wireless
application protocol) and
cell phones have been using XML for longer than desktops.
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