HP's Mobile SOA Vision: Consumers Developing Location-Based Apps

HP has just announcedits Service Delivery Platform 2.0, a SOA bundle aimed at telcos. Theinteresting parts are its intended applications, and how similar thetelcos are to other enterprises.

The SDP itself is a customized version of the same SOA productsthat HP sells to enterprises -- namely management (from Mercury) andgovernance (from Systinet), plus other tools developed in-house.Notably absent is an ESB or other messaging backbone, but HP paintsthis as a plus, saying most customers already have one.

That's true in the case of large telcos, and increasingly it'strue for others users as well, thanks to commoditization and opensource. Of course, customers who already have an ESB also are morelikely to have many of the other features that HP is hawking, so itneeds to add something more.

For most customers, this means consulting and integrationservices. The most interesting is its SOAMaturity Assessment calculator, a free tool that tries toquantify an organization's SOA technology, comparing it againstothers 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 bethe used by RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) on cell phones. On itsown, this isn't a particularly new idea: the wireless Web always was supposed to be about more than static Web pages (WAP was the wirelessapplication protocol) andcell phones have been using XML for longer than desktops.The new part is that most of the applications will be developed bythird parties, not necessarily just the telco's partners. HPenvisages services used by millions of developers. Some will be thecarriers' business customers, but most will be consumers.

For people used to today's cell phones, that can seem hard tobelieve: Most still aren't able to run third-party apps at all, anddeveloping for the ones that are (mostly Symbian and Windows Mobilesmartphones) isn't easy. However, RIAs tend to be browser-based, sodevelopers don't actually need access to the underlying hardware.

That suits mobile operators just fine: They want the platform tobe their network, not the phone. HP hopes that business and consumerswill build their own applications that access network features such as location-tracking and messaging. Most would be closer to mashupsthan what we usually think of as apps.

The idea makes a lot of sense. Maps are the most popular kind ofmashup, and they're also the killer app for mobile data. But rightnow, it's still just an idea: Cell phones with Java, Ajax, or Flash already can access mashups in the same way as other Web content, and the mobile operators will need to have some very compelling Web services if they want to attract developers away from APIs on the public Internet.