Open-source SOA provider WSO2 Monday will unveil version 1.5 of its WSO2 Mashup Server, which allows enterprises to consume, aggregate, and publish information in a variety of forms and from a variety of sources.

The latest version from the Mountain View, Calif., and Sri Lanka company adds WSO2 Data Services and security features for enterprise-class service composition. Mashup Server 1.5 is built on the WSO2 Web Services Application Server based on Apache/Axis 2. It can be used as an individual service development and deployment tool or can scale up to support team, enterprise, or Internet communities. [Disclosure: WSO2 has been a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The original mashup server debuted in January of this year. Key features of the new version include:

• Integrated WSO2 Data Services, providing mashup-ready Web service interfaces to relational databases and other data sources such as Excel spreadsheets, and comma-separated values (CSVs).
  
  
• An integrated user interface (UI) for easily managing secured mashup services based on WS-Security. Users can choose among some 20 popular enterprise scenarios providing various types and combinations of authentication, encryption, and signing.
  
  
• Application programming interface (API) and configuration extensions, facilitating the consumption of secured services based on WS-Security "from enabling communications between secured services to defining who is allowed to access a service and in what ways.
  
  
• User login using OpenID, which complements existing login options based on username/password and Microsoft InfoCard-based electronic IDs.
  
  
• Google Gadget support, offering stubs, templates, and try-it pages for Google Gadgets that can be hosted within the WSO2 Mashup Server or externally, such as in a user's iGoogle page. It also includes a beta dashboard add-in for hosting Google Gadgets within the mashup server itself.

Version 1.5 will be available for download Monday. It carries no software licensing or subscription fees, although WSO2 offers a range of service and support options, including training, consulting, and custom development.

The Pike County, Ky., schools have solved an Internet access parity problem with a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution from IBM and Desktone. As part of a five-year agreement, IBM will provide the county's classrooms with service that gives older PCs the same Internet ability as newer models.

Not unlike many companies, the county's 25 schools purchased and replaced computer equipment on a staggered basis, meaning some classrooms had computers that were over six years old, while other classrooms had spanking-new models. This created an inequality among students that school officials felt was unacceptable.

Under the agreement with IBM, and using the Desktone DaaS software, the schools' 1,400 Internet-enabled computers will have access to the district's standard desktop image, regardless of the age of the device or whether it's a PC or a thin client. The hosted architecture will also include IBM storage, xSeries servers, and VMware software.

An added benefit of the solutions is that homebound students will be able to keep up with their coursework using home computers, and teachers who need to work from home will have access to their materials with the same security and filtering as if they were in the classroom.

Desktone burst on the scene a year ago, when it announced an infusion of venture capital funds. Since then, it's continued to make news, most recently when it announced that HP has signed on as the first member of its partner program.

The broad affection for the term "cloud computing" and all that sticks to that nowadays will mean broad affection too for desktop as a service. Desktone has its sights set on helping service providers ramp up DaaS offerings, but enterprises will be in this one too. Citrix, VMware and Microsoft will make sure they allow enterprises to do DaaS as well as the cloud providers.

I'd bank on a rich environment where a continuum of offerings develop, with myriad business models and packages of services. Most interesting will be whether the DaaS providers can mimick the traditional desktop providers as a channel for ... apps, services, ads, (craplets!), business services, as well as maintenance and support.

Hey, if it worked for the hairball, why not the cloud ball?

Bill Ives at AppGap has a good take on why this development is important:

There are many large companies that still generate an extensive number of mainframe applications. One of their clients created 484,000 new mainframe apps in the past year. The number of IT people who can sit and stare at mainframe green screens is getting smaller. Now users can monitor and communicate through a browser-based system that is more familiar to the current generation of IT people.

Serena jumped into the mashup world just a little under a year ago. At the time, I said I thought they were "taking a walk on the wild services side," but I saw great hope for their approach. Just last month, Serena made news again when it released its Mashup Composer service, which allows users to drag and drop a wide variety of consumer information and combine it with data from internal applications.

The new release joins a wide array of other business mashups from Serena. All are available at the Serena Mashup Exchange.

Engine Yard, which provides a cloud-based Ruby and Rails deployment platform, has completed a second round of financing, including a chunk from cloud-computing heavy hitter Amazon.

The San Francisco-based company today announced an additional $15 million in funding, following a $3.5-million injection in January of this year. Helping to provide the financing were New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), Amazon, and current investor Benchmark Capital.

Engine Yard officials say the new funding will help the company accelerate business, spur R&D for their forthcoming cloud-computing cluster platform, and continue their innovation with their open-source projects, Rubinius and Merb.

Rubinius, a project to develop the next generation virtual machine for the Ruby programming language, implements the core libraries in Ruby, making a system accessible for development and extension. Merb is a light framework that is ORM, JavaScript library, and template language agnostic.

Engine Yard, founded in 2006, offers a deployment platform with fully managed services. This platform combines high-end clustering resources to run Ruby and Rails applications in the cloud.

Amazon has been offering cloud-based services for more than two years, and their participation bodes well for Engine Yard's position in the forefront of two emerging markets -- Ruby and Rails and cloud computing.

You can listen to the podcast here and read a full transcript here.

The BMS suite is expected to be generally available in the Fall. More information is available from the Borland Web site.

Earlier this week, as I reported on Wednesday, Progress bought IONA Technologies for a little over $100 million, which broadened Progress' position in the SOA marketplace.

Last August, I had a podcast discussion with Colleen Smith, managing director of Software as a Service for Progress, in which we discussed the company's acquisition strategies, among other things.

I took my first briefing with Mindreef, given their neighborly proximity, about three years ago. The seasoned team had a hit on their hands with SOAPscope, and their timing in the SOA market was great. But I'm not sure the company grew as was hoped, and perhaps the fast evolution of SOA beyond a WS-* emphasis played a role. SOAP hasn't blossomed to quite the degree some people had forecast.

In any event, I expect this was a happy transition.

Not all trains run on time, but The Eclipse Foundation has kept to its schedule with its annual release train, this year named Ganymede.

For the third year in a row, the Eclipse community has delivered, on the same day as in previous years, numerous software updates across a wide range of projects.

This year's iteration includes software that spans 23 projects and represents over 18 million lines of code. Highlights of the release include the new p2 provisioning platform, new Equinox security features, new Ecore modeling tools, and support for service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Now that the Eclipse Foundation has proven it mettle with delivery of consistent and complete packages of downloads -- now's the time to take this puppy to the cloud. I'd like to see more integration between Eclipse products and cloud-based development, integration and deployment services. And I'm not alone on these wants, no siree.

Amazon Web Services has proven the demand and acceptance. A modern IDE needs the cloud hand-offs and test and real-world performance proofing that cloud and platform as a service (PaaS) are now offering. How about a hybrid model where the IDE remains local but more application lifecycle management and test and debug features comes as services?

How about integration between such a hybrid model and then associated ease to choose among a variety of cloud deployment partners and models? Build, test, and deploy across many providers and models, all close in the bosom of Eclipse. All supported by the community. We could call it Eclipse Cloud Services (ECS). I'm in.

Well, until IBM figures that out, here are the lastest and greatest on earth-bound Eclipse. Key features of the release for SOA support include:

• SCA Designer, which provides a graphical interface for developers who wish to create composite applications using the SCA 1.0 standard.
• Policy Editor, a collection of editors and validators that makes it easy for developers to construct and manipulate XML expressions that conform to the WS-Policy W3C standard.
• Business process modeling notation (BPMN) Editor that allows consumers to construct and extend the BPMN 1.1 standard notation to illustrate business processes.

For Equinox and runtime projects:

• A new provisioning system, called p2, makes it easier for Eclipse users to install and update Eclipse.
• New security features, including a preferences-like storage for sensitive data such as passwords and login credentials and the ability to easily use the Java authentication service (JAAS) in Equinox.
• Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.1, with new features, including the ability to customize the look and feel with Presentation Factories and CSS and the ability to store application state information on a per user basis.
• The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF), with real-time shared editing and other communications features to allow developers to communicate and collaborate from within Eclipse.

Developer tools include:

• A new JavaScript IDE, called JSDT, provides the same level of support for JavaScript as the JDT provides for Java. New features include code completion, quick fix, formatting and validation.
• The Business Intelligenec Reporting Tools (BIRT) project now provides an improved JavaScript editor and a new JavaScript debugger for debugging report event handlers.
• DTP has added a new graphical SQL query editor, called the SQL Query Builder, and improved usability of connection profile creation and management for users and adopters/extenders.

More information on all of the new the features can be found at the Ganymede Web site.

The idea behind the yearly release train, according to the Eclipse Foundation, is to provide predictability and reliability for developers in an effort to promote commercial adoption of the Eclipse community's projects.

ZDNet blogger Ed Burnette details how Eclipse maneuvered pieces of the new release out to mirror sites in an attempt to avoid the type of logjam created when the new Firefox went live recently. Apparently, it was only partly successful, although, according to Ed, things have since smoothed out.

Ganymede, named after one of the moons of Jupiter, eclipsed the previous releases, names Callisto and Europa, also moons of Jupiter. Last year's release train encompassed 21 projects, and Europa, the 2006 release, included only 10.

Ganymede is available for download, in one of seven packages, on the Eclipse Web site.

As companies search for the holy grail of a "single view" of the customer, Coveo Solutions, Inc., which provides search-powered enterprise information access, has unveiled its Coveo G2B for CRM, a way to provide a view of all relevant customer data from a wide variety of sources.

G2B for CRM brings together data from such sources as salesforce.com, Siebel Systems, corporate intranets, tech support emails, customer support databases, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

It also provides advanced content analytics, giving workers the ability to present customer data graphically. Presenting customer data as a spreadsheet or a pie chart allows management or workers in planning, forecasting, and resource management. This can eliminate the need for time-consuming database queries and reporting, even when sifting through millions of documents.

Coveo's approach shows the productivity benefits of enterprise search continue to be explored. Google (appliances), Microsoft (with FAST Search technology) and Autonomy certainly think so.

Newton, Mass.- and Quebec-based Coveo G2B for CRM, built on the Coveo Enterprise Search-platform technology, is part of the company's G2B Information Access Suite, which allows knowledge workers to obtain a unified view of enterprise information.

I'm interested in seeing more mashups of search from across many enterprise and web-based providers (including social networks) to give even more complete and vetted views of customers, suppliers, partners, employees and any others that relate to business activities or ecologies. The information is out there, just waiting to be harvested and managed.

And when are we going to get a single view of IT assets in association with business processes? Increasingly searching IT devices and resources is playing a role in enterprise search too. How about not only getting a single view of the customer but also instant views to the right systems to reach out to them through, or the right integration avenues?

Let's search people and systems and gather insights to the systems context of business along with the social aspects. People, process, systems and search. That's the ticket.

Call it a Route 128 SOA date. Progress Software is buying IONA Technologies for a little over $100 million in actual value, broadening Progress's service oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio significantly and catapulting Progress into the open source software infrastructure arena.

Progress said Wednesday it is offering $4.05 per share in cash for IONA, a total equity value of $162 million, or $106 million net of cash and marketable securities. Both companies are publicly traded. The transaction is expected to be completed in September.

Both companies come from a long but quite distinct lineage, and both have their U.S. headquarters within a 20-minute drive around Boston's Route 128 technology corridor, from Bedford to Waltham. Progress has its roots in tightly coupled, client-server tools (Progress 4GL) and runtime platforms, while IONA, based in Dublin, Ireland, hails from the CORBA and middleware messaging and integration space.

Only a SOA mashup could make good bedfellows of these. That's because one company's lineage reaches back to the origins of client-server computing (Progress was founded in 1981), while the other reaches back to the emergence of the mainframe world into distributed computing (IONA was formed in 1991). SOA, of course, aims to make these worlds play well together and then build new services on top of the service-enabled older assets to offer business process advantages and efficiencies.

And yet despite their disparate origins, the companies match up quite well, on product capabilities, locations, direction and client verticals. Progress has already been acquiring in a SOA direction with the January 2006 acquisition of Actional Corp., which became the Progress unit focused on SOA management, security, and governance. IONA made a bold move to embrace open source for its SOA portfolio, supporting an open version of its Artix products, while also buying LogicBlaze in April 2007.

Combined with IONA's ESB and middleware products, Progress will emerge as a full-feature SOA infrastructure provider, but with a large installed base in deployed client-server and web applications and a strong presence in IONA's stronghold of finance and telecoms. [Disclosure: IONA is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

While there is overlap between the registry/repository capabilities for both companies, separate yet interoperable registry/repositories can operate well side by side and any consolidation is fairly straight-forward. In other words, these products could work well together and then combine. The fact that both companies support SOA governance capabilities indicates more an overlap than a conflict.

UPDATE: And I'm reminded too that Progress's Sonic in-house development brought an early ESB function set to the market. (I could have sworn that was an acquisition!) This means the combined companies will be supporting and offering several flavors of ESB. Given that IONA already offers several ESB approaches -- both commercial and open source -- this may provide confusion to customers of both companies. A clear and logical ESB story will then need to come from the companies.

Given we've seen more federated approaches to ESB in recent memory, there may well be a Progress Sonic-Artix-FUSE ecology play in the works, for a more complete ESB solution comprised of several actual products and open source options. One-size-fits all may not be the best go-to-market with ESBs after all, given the significant requirements variations from such divergent use cases as SMBs, financials, service providers, cloud providers and SaaS providers.

UPDATE: More input from bloggers Tony Baer and Joe McKendrick.

The larger question proffered by the merger comes in the relationship between commercial products and open source models. Progress has not shown as vigorous an interest in open source as IONA, which became practically a benefactor to the Apache Foundation on several notable SOA projects. Progress is very much a licenses software company at a time when the software industry is shifting to subscription and services-based approaches.

It's no surprise that IONA has been sold. IONA made it clear it would enter into acquisition talks last February. A rumored suitor was Software AG, which had recently absorbed WebMethods/Infravio. There were questions on whether IONA's open source strategy would survive any such acquisition, too.

I have to believe that the Progress IONA merger means that Progress will welcome the diversification of business models that the IONA open source strategy entails, meaning a segue from per server and per seat licensing to more of a services, support, maintenance and training revenues model. The two companies can enjoy the commercial maturity of their current products while benefitting from the lower R&D and development costs of community-based projects for newer products.

We'll have to wait to see how aggressively the soon-to-be expanded Progress Software ramps up on the open source SOA strategy. What's nice about open source SOA is that is plays well on offense and defense, meaning the supplier can offer the market products and services that can build on its strengths while attacking its competitors on the revenue sources it holds most dear.

Implications on partnering with the Progress-IONA merger will be important. A well-integrated Progress-IONA may be of significant interest to global systems integrators, as they seek options on infrastructure suppliers, and certainly appreciate a support and services model. Progress may find itself more in an ecology play with other open source providers, from HP to Novell to Ingres to, gasp, Sun (not too far away campus-wise in Burlington). Maybe Microsoft is serious about its newly forged openness and focus on supporting rather than subverting enterprise heterogeneity, and so may find Progress a ramping partner.

The merger also shifts Progress's competitive landscape, putting it more up against IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat. I think the open source data base play for Progress therefore has some interesting implications. Perhaps Ingres may make more than a partner.

In the meantime, Progress can assist its applications clients move to the more modern computing paradigms while IONA can help on the back-end for integration and high performance transactions while broadening Progress's share of wallet in more enterprises and verticals. And now, viola, Progress is an open source company. The best part of the deal, therefore, is how these two companies' installed bases give the combined firm a steady yet diversified revenue stream that should build on their legacies -- and their customers' legacies -- well.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) advances have helped IT departments recast themselves as mature and process-oriented. But the role and influence of ITIL, especially version 3, is extending well beyond IT organization and operations improvements to impact such essential endeavors as as service oriented architecture (SOA), portfolio management and low-risk change management.

ITIL, in effect, is fostering cultural and behavioral change inside of IT departments, which also has a direct bearing on general business transformation and the ability of enterprises to innovate and compete writ large.

To help better understand the role and impact of ITIL on actual IT departments in a variety of use-case scenarios, I interviewed two ITIL practitioners, Sean McClean, principal at KatalystNow, and Hwee Ming Ng, solutions architect in HP's Consulting and Integration group. The discussion was recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

This ITIL impact podcast comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is at a crossroads, moving from pilot to enterprise status for many companies. As the trends and economics landscapes shift, SOA's benefits and pay-offs are accelerating.

Green and energy-conscious companies are seeing SOA through the context of data center and applications modernization. Toss in a surge of interest in virtualization, ongoing methodological on-ramps to SOA and a budding fascination in cloud computing methods, and we're looking at the means to accommodate (at lower TCO) all the old and new of IT systems, platforms, framework, applications and delivery services.

That takes data center transformation, and not just adding more servers. We also need is the means to manage the complexity, fragility, scale and cost. HP seems to see this clearly. The goal of data center transformation that goes hand in hand with SOA efficiency is clear, but how to get there is another matter.

To probe deeper into SOA's impact on enterprise IT and business transformation, we sat down with Tim Hall, director of HP's SOA Center products for a discussion moderated by me, recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

Listen to this SOA impact podcast, part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Business intelligence (BI) has been a top investment for corporations in the past several years, but the ability for BI to generate value and strategic direction guidance is merely in adolescence.

In health care, customer retention, energy and oil management, and for global risk reduction and compliance, BI is offering some of the best payoffs from IT and datacenter investments, says Rod Walker, vice president for information management at HP's Consulting and Integration group.

In this podcast discussion, Walker joins me to explore how BI will continue to be one of the most effective ways for business leaders to leverage IT over he next decade. Proper information management -- including all content in all forms, and not just structured data -- provides powerful market analytics and customer and user behavior inferences to enable real-time decisions about core services, product offerings and go to market campaigns.

Listen to this BI business opportunity overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Walker interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

More enterprise IT departments are working toward Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles and reference models for running their organizations. Yet ITIL can provide more benefits than initially meets the eye, including accelerating service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, faster mean time to recovery in IT operations, and more effective change management.

Dan Rueckert, worldwide practice director for both the service management and security practices in HP's Consulting and Integration group, explains in an interview the direct and significant ancillary payoffs from ITIL adoption -- from establishing an IT service lifecycle to defining an overall IT service strategy.

Listen to this ITIL overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Rueckert interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Enterprise CIOs face mounting challenges that are hard and getting even harder. HP says it has a lifeline for these IT departments and leaders over the next five years by helping them to dramatically cut the size of IT budgets relative to the enterprises' total revenue. This allows a shift on IT spending from operations to innovation via next generation data centers.

David Gee, vice president of marketing for HP Software, in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week, discusses the large global opportunity for enterprises and service providers to cut the relative size of IT budgets by investing in modern data centers that save energy, consolidate applications, leverage virtualization, and rely more on automation than manual upkeep processes.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for next generation data centers that focus IT on the businesses' interests.

The Gee interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

There may be no greater "silos" in all of IT than the gulf between application development and data center operations. For the sake of enhancing both, however, common ground is needed -- and HP is putting together a path of greater collaboration, visibility, management and automation to engender "application lifecycle optimization" to better bind design time with runtime.

Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager of HP's BTO software unit, and former CEO of HP's 2007 acquisition, Opsware, explains in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week how these hither to fore distinct orbits of IT can finally coalesce.

Through managed requirements collaboration and the use of "contracts" between the designers, testers, business leaders and IT operators, application lifecycle optimization has arrived, says Horowitz. Bringing more input and visibility into applications design, test and refinement, in a managed fashion, allows applications to better meet business goals, while also providing the data center operators better means to host those applications efficiently with high availability, he says.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for and philosophy on how BTO and next generation data centers come together.

The Horowitz interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

HP opened the second day of its Software Universe event in Las Vegas with "product day," but the presentations seemed more about process -- the processes that usher application definitions and development into real world use.

I've heard of applications lifecycle, sure, but the last few days I've heard more about data center lifecycle. So how do they come together? HP's vision is about finally allowing the operations and development stages of a full application lifecycle to more than co-exist -- to actually reinforce and refine each other.

Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager of HP's BTO software unit, pointed out on stage at the Sands Expo Center that HP is number one in the global market for applications testing and requirements management for software development. And, of course, HP is strong in operations and systems management.

The desired synergies between these strengths need to begin very early, he said, in the requirements gathering and triage phases. Horowitz, the former CEO of HP's 2007 Opsware acquisition, also explained the fuller roles that business, security, operations and QA people will play in the design time into runtime progression. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

I guess we need to call this the lifecycle of IT because HP is increasingly allowing applications requirements and efficient and automated data center requirements to actually relate to each other. You can't build the best data center without knowing what the applications need and how they will behave. And you can't create the best applications that will perform and be adaptable over time without knowing a lot about the data centers that will support them. Yet that's just what IT is and has been doing.

Next on stage, Jonathan Rende, vice president of products for SOA, application security and quality management at HP, painted the picture of how HP's products and acquisitions over the past few years come together to support the IT lifecycle.

Application owners, project managers, business analysts, QA team, performance team, and security teams -- all need to have input into applications requirements, design, test and deployment, said Rende. The HP products have been integrated and aligned to allow these teams to, in effect, do multi-level and simultaneous change management.

Remember the 3D chess on the original Star Trek? That's sort of what such multi-dimensional requirements input and visibility reminds me of. Social networking tools like wikis and micro blogging also come to mind.

Rende then described how change management and process standardization in the requirements, design, develop, test and refinement processes -- in waterfall or agile methods settings -- broadens applications lifecycle management into the business and operations domains.

By allowing lots of changes to occur from many parties and interests in the requirements phase, the IT lifecycle begins in the requirements, but extends into ongoing refinements for concerns about, for example, security and performance testing. Also, the business people can come in and request (and get!) changes and refinements later and perhaps (someday) right on through the IT lifecycle.

I really like this vision, it extends what we used to think of simultaneous design, code and test -- while building advanced test beds -- but extends the concurrency benefits broadly to include more teams, more impacts, more governance and risk reduction. Without the automation from the products, the complexity of managing all these inputs early and often would break down.

HP's products and processes are allowing more business inputs from more business interests into more of the IT lifecycle. The operations folks also get to take a look and offer input on best approaches on how the applications/services will behave in runtime, and throughout the real IT lifecycle.

Because there's also portfolio management benefits applied early in the process, the decision on when to launch an application boils down to a "contract" between those parities affected by the applications in production, said Rende. This allows an acceptance of risk and responsibility, and pushes teams to look on development and deployment as integrated, and not sequential.

Horowitz further explained how HP's announcements this week around advanced change management and a tighter alignment with such virtualization environments as VMWare will allow better and deeper feedback, refinement and efficiency across the IT lifecycle.

This "IT lifecycle" story is not yet complete, but it's come a long way quite quickly. HP is definitely raising the bar and defining the right vision for how IT in toto needs to mature and advance, to allow the enterprises to do more better for less.

Financial institution face competitive pressure to automate processes and move toward straight-through processing (STP), while ensuring compliance with multiple messaging standards. IONA Technologies today released a set of enhancements to Artix Data Services designed to reduce risk exposure and operational costs.

The latest release from the Dublin, Ireland-based IONA includes a comprehensive implementation of SWIFTNet MT Standards Release 2008, a new free online validation service, and new offerings for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives processing and payments STP. [Disclosure: IONA is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Based on Artix Data Services, IONA's open and standards-based development tool for building model-driven data services, the IONA Artix Data Services Standards Libraries include support for over 100 financial messaging standards implementations across 22 standards bodies, offering customers rich, out-of-the-box support for financial messaging data services requirements.

Enhancements within the latest release include additional SWIFTNet MX standards for proxy voting and cash reporting, additions of payments standards for STEP2 and TARGET2, and the addition of Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation(DTCC) Fund/SERV and MDDL. These standards libraries enable institutions to rapidly implement and incrementally deploy reusable financial messaging data services.

The standards library includes support for over 240 MT message types, 2,000 validation rules and 28,000 test cases. The new free IONA Validation Service for SWIFT provides an easy testing solution to verify compliance with SWIFT SR2008 syntax and semantics, allowing customers to model, test and deploy compliant messages today well in advance of the November 15, 2008 SWIFT-mandated deadline.

For automating OTC derivatives processes, IONA provides financial messaging data services tools with extensive support for FpML, (DTCC) Deriv/SERV TIW, SwapsWire and SWIFTNet FpML. IONA's Payments Modernization solution offering provides support for SEPA (Single European Payments Area), ISO20022, SWIFTNet FIN, EBA STEP2 XCT and ECB TARGET2 payments standards.

More information on IONA's Artix Data Services Financial Standards Libraries is available at the IONA Web site.

Hewlett-Packard and VMWare today announced a deeper product collaboration going forward, offering to enterprises and service providers a single management and control approach to both physical and virtual software infrastructure stacks.

Through the partnership, announced at the HP Software Universe event in Las Vegas, HP's Business Service Management products -- including HP Business Availability Center, HP Operations Center and HP Network Management Center -- will help automate the management of the VMware virtualization platform.

Both the HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping products and HP Universal CMDB configuration data management suite will aid in discovery of virtualized environments for improved tracking and reporting of changes in VMWare virtualized envrionments.

And HP's Business Service Automation capabilities -- including HP Server Automation Center, HP Client Automation and HP Operations Orchestration -- will assist in the oversight and operational upkeep of services running in VMWare-supported virtual infrastructure instances.

HP and VMWare did not unveil any financial partnership news, but the two certainly seem chummy these days. HP clearly sees a huge market opportunity for helping to manage the complexity of virtualized platforms, given he need for enterprises to cut total costs through higher hardware utilization and the ability to dynamically and automatically match computer power supply with applications and storage demand.

The two companies did outline bundling and packaging of their products, in that new software bundles will combine VMware's Infrastructure 3 software suite with the HP Insight Control Environment for additional automation benefits. The goal, said the companies, is to provide a "comprehensive and seamless physical and virtual platform management" capability set.

"We're expanding our relationship with VMware to jointly develop solutions that provide customers with comprehensive management of virtualized business applications running on the VMware platform," said Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager, of HP's Business Technology Optimization software, in a release.

I was just having breakfast yesterday with two systems architects from Seattle, who said they were exploring virtualization, including both VMWare and Xen hypervisors. The liked the potential benefits but were put off by the complexity of setting the stuff up and maintaining it. Their choices, they said, pretty much boiled down to consulting help or more automation in the software.

Yes, says HP, to both. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Savvy acquisitions and a perfect storm of trends and economics have given HP's software unit a prominence few would have predicted five years ago. But today HP Software has a big fat data center