Introduced at the HP Technology Forum, the three HP SOA Competency Centres are comprehensive experience centres aiming to enable HP, its customers and its partners to pilot and evaluate SOA technologies, solutions and implementations. The centres will also showcase HPs 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, re-usable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs.

HPs SOA offering, supported by the new centres and a key component of HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy, takes advantage of infrastructure technology to deliver IT as a service, building towards an automated, 24 x 7, 'lights-out' computing environment.

The opening of the three SOA Competency Centres brings HPs total to five worldwide, with two additional centres located in Sophia Antipolis, France, and Tokyo.

HP delivers top-to-bottom SOA offerings, says Deborah Nelson, senior vice-president, Technology Solutions Group, HP. These centres allow customers around the world to experience first-hand how to apply HPs extensive SOA capabilities to real-world business challenges and reach their competitive or organisational goals.   

Gartner estimates that by 2010 at least 65% of large enterprise organisations will have more than 35% of their application portfolios SOA-based, up from fewer than five percent of organisations 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 todays competitive environment, according to Gartner.

Several new HP SOA customers, including Edogawa City, located at the eastern edge of Tokyo, are in the process of implementing an SOA into their IT environment to develop new business capabilities at a lower cost, while capitalising on the need to respond to change.