HP’s GIFt to the SOA world

I just noticed a press release from HP to announce the release of GIF (the Governance Interoperability Framework). In short, GIF is a specification that describes how to use the HP SOA Registry for governance tasks that go beyond what UDDI can do. It has been around for a long time inside Systinet then Mercury then HP and some partners had been somewhat enrolled in the program (whatever that meant) but it wasn’t clear what HP was really planning to do with it. Looks like they have decided to put some muscle into it by attracting more partners and releasing it. Or at least announcing that they would release it. I can’t find it on the HP site so I can’t see if and how the specification changed since when I was in HP. It will be interesting to see if they present it as a neutral specification of which the HP SOA Registry is one implementation or as something that requires that registry.

I also looked for it on Wikipedia since the press release declares that it will be made available there but to no avail. That part puzzles me a bit since this would be pretty atypical for Wikipedia. At most there could be an article about GIF that links to the specification on hp.com. And even then, you’d have to convince Wikipedia editors that the topic is “worthy of notice”. Or maybe they meant to refer to an HP wiki and some confused editor turned that into Wikipedia?

The press release has a few additional items (yet more fancy-sounding SOA offering from HP Services and some new OEM-friendly packaging for the Registry) but they don’t seem too exciting to me. The GIF action is what could be interesting if things really get moving on this. In any case, congratulations to Luc and Dave.

[UPDATED 2008/2/4: turns out Luc isn’t at HP anymore, he’s joined Active Endpoints as Senior Director of Product Management. Double congrats then, one set for the past work on GIF and the other for the new job.]

[UPDATED 2008/2/5: there is now a Wikipedia page with a description of GIF. But still no sign of the specification itself on the HP GIF page.]

[UPDATED 2008/3/16: you can now download the spec (but you’ll need to register with HP first).]