The services areas are the same as the SOA services that HP announced in 2005, which range from front-end assessment services to the actual design, integration, and management of business process models and Web services, according to Tim Treat, manager of worldwide packaged applications for enterprise application services at HP Consulting and Integration.
HP has now combined the SOA offerings with its SAP ERP upgrades and the design and implementation of SAP NetWeaver applications, Treat said.
For example, there are many large enterprise customers who haven’t yet upgraded from SAP R/3 to MySAP ERP, Treat said. These integration projects are complicated, often long-term engagements, involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of users, and SAP doesn’t plan to change the core of MySAP until 2011.
But some of HP’s large SAP accounts may opt only for the ERP upgrade, and not necessarily the accompanying SOA services. For those customers who are more interested in SOA, HP will provide NetWeaver development services from its heavily offshore applications centers.
Customers will be able to get customized composite applications for their SOA environments, and HP is also working on developing industry-specific process and services. Treat said the company has started designing SOA applications for big clients in the manufacturing and distribution industries, and more announcements for verticals will be made as they come up.
HP will also provide services around SAP’s Discovery server, some of which will come with MySAP and the NetWeaver stack, Treat said. These servers are rather inexpensive at just under $10,000 a pop, he said.
