HP announced on Monday SOA governance software and services aimed at helping companies accelerate SOA adoption while reducing risks.

Also on Monday, HP is expanding its GIF (Governance Interoperability Framework), which features specifications for governance interoperability and deepens the company's support for heterogeneous environments.

Monday's announcements include a new release of HP SOA Systinet software for design and runtime governance of SOA services and services lifecycle management via an enhanced integration with HP SOA Manager.

"The key thing here is we've enhanced these two products so you have integrated design time and runtime governance," said Ian Bruce, HP SOA marketing manager. Design time governance covers issues around developing and deploying services as well as discovery; runtime governance entails dynamic invocation and discovery and factors like policy management and enforcement.

HP SOA Systinet enables developers to check services against policies through an Eclipse-based policy validation plug-in to ensure that services conform to requirements before being published. The software also supports significantly enhanced graphical navigation, advanced reporting, searching, and expanded lifecycle support.

HP's new HP SOA Registry Foundation software, meanwhile, is designed for ISVs as a standards-based way to publish and discover SOA services and artifacts. It can be embedded in packages applications.

Through the new HP Validation and Implementation Service for SOA Governance, HP consultants can help customers validate SOA services by implementing a governance model using HP Systinet software. The service is intended to help predict and optimize performance of SOA applications and infrastructure. An HP Validation Service for SOA Quality, meanwhile, establishes processes for managing the business risk of SOA-enabled services, HP said.

Additionally, HP is introducing services to install and configure HP SOA Systinet and HP SOA Manager to help customers get a quicker return on investment. Also being offered are new SOA education and SOA training courses.

The company is also announcing an expansion of its HP Governance GIF, designed to simplify the exchange of information between HP SOA Systinet software, acting as a system of record, and third-party technologies. Ten additional partners are joining, including Active Endpoints, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, JackBe, Layer 7 Technologies, LogicLibrary, Nexaweb, Oracle, Sonoa Systems, and Vordel.

HP also will make GIF specifications available at hp.com and Wikipedia. GIF partner support is being expanded as well.