Oracle and HP ink pact to boost developer sales

The two companies have agreed to collude on integration tightening roadmap

Oracle and Hewlett Packard (HP) will tomorrow announce a new partnership to jointly target firms building service oriented architectures (SOA).

Under the terms of the agreement, HP will resell Oracle's Fusion Middleware as part of its SOA portfolio and train 6,500 of its services professionals to support the technology.

The two companies will also develop a roadmap to tighten integration between Fusion Middleware and HP's OpenView IT management suite, according to Tim Payne, vice president of technology marketing at Oracle. He said the alliance would see the two vendors offer firms a Fusion-based SOA environment that they could manage through the OpenView suite.

The partnership comes just days after iWay Software, the integration arm of business intelligence vendor Information Builders, launched a new middleware platform designed to help firms better build and manage SOAs.

iWay SOA Middleware bundles many of iWay's existing integration tools and adaptors into a single suite, according to the company's technical director for Europe Middle East and Africa Calum Nobles.

He added that the suite, which includes a scalable enterprise service bus as well as tools for managing and monitoring services' status, reduces the amount of hand coding required to develop componentised applications.

"The more hand-coding you do the higher your ongoing maintenance costs will be," he said. "Standards based adaptors and visual flow [dashboards] mean people with less coding ability can develop the SOA, freeing your coders up for other tasks."