Founded by systems management professionals from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Motorola, the company came into being just as service-oriented architecture was beginning to emerge, said Craig Wassenberg, vice president of product planning. So product development of software agents to manage hardware such as blade servers was based on SOA from the beginning, he said.
"The software architecture we developed was an SOA created a few years before SOA really became popular," Wassenberg recalled. "All the management software that we have is structured as services. Just like in the SOA world, each service has a well-defined user interface. There's a service definition language. Each service encapsulates and abstracts the underlying implementation of how that service is delivered. Legacy software can be integrated into this loosely coupled services world through encapsulation."
