An IDC Business Value Spotlight sponsored by HP found that an international telecommunications company achieved a 327 percent return on investment over three years using HP SOA Governance and Management solutions, including an earlier version of HP SOA Systinet. The study found that HP SOA solutions helped the customer better align IT project management with the organisation's business strategies.

The company now uses its internal resources more efficiently while improving the quality and reducing the cost of its subscriber services. In addition, the study found that the company had:

• Reduced technology service downtime by 33 percent, resulting in a savings of $2 million annually.
• Improved customer retention, leading to a savings of $1.35 million annually.
• Reduced time to market for new services, resulting in an annual benefit of $1.8 million.
• Saved nearly $800,000 in IT costs.

"IT organisations are accelerating the expansion of SOA across the entire organisation to significantly improve IT responsiveness while reducing costs and freeing up more resources for innovation", stated Tim Hall, director, SOA products, Software, HP. "As the industry leader in SOA governance, HP SOA Systinet helps IT organisations integrate SOA with existing IT processes and bring new users up to speed quickly."

HP SOA Systinet 3.00 helps increase the business value of SOA by empowering many people within an organisation to discover, evaluate and reuse services in their composite applications and business processes.

New features in HP SOA Systinet 3.00 include:

• Best-practices-driven automation: Customers can automate service life cycle policy compliance through capturing best practices to make it easier to achieve their SOA objectives. New, pre-built life cycles and templates help bring non-experts up to speed quickly. More sophisticated users can customize service life cycles to meet the needs of the business using wizard-driven, graphical and application programming interfaces. Role-based visual dashboards give users the information they need in a format that relates to their responsibilities.
• Integration with existing processes: HP SOA Systinet helps drive effective decision making across the service life cycle. The software can trigger business policies based on service quality through integration with HP Service Test Management or prompt actions to manage rogue services in production through integration with the HP Universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
• Governance of business processes: Customers can create reusable business processes and include them in the governance framework using new support for industry-standard Business Process Execution Language. Organisations can increase productivity in their business process management initiatives with business processes that are easier to discover and reuse.
• Automation for scale: Organisations can automate repetitive tasks across a large number of services with new support for bulk operations and life cycle cloning, capabilities that simplify the implementation of major changes. They can ensure investment protection in chosen standards with new support for Open CSA (previously SCA) and WSDL 2.0.

HP also provides a portfolio of SOA enablement solution offerings. The portfolio includes best practices and products for automating the SOA governance, quality and management processes required for successful SOA adoption as well as SOA integration services from EDS, an HP company.

The portfolio enables customers to build an enterprise SOA focused on efficiency, security and performance. With standards-based delivery methodologies and tools backed by global SOA competency centers, EDS helps customers increase technology flexibility to better meet business demands.