HP last week was the latest major vendor to plunge into the SOA consulting business. The firm has launched an "application modernization" consulting service for enterprises implementing services-oriented architectures.

The HP services are designed to get companies to SOA by getting them past their own infrastructure obstacles. HP will help customers either re-engineer an existing application or re-host it to a simpler-to-manage platform.

HP joins IBM and BEA in their attempts to capture a share of the growing SOA services market. When IBM announced its plans for an SOA practice early this year, it estimated that it would reap $100 million in services revenues alone--not counting sales of actual products.

As part of its SOA practice, IBM opened four SOA design centers located in Austin, Beijing, Delhi, and Hursley (England). The centers were developed as resources to help companies use IBM software as the foundation of enterprise-wide SOA deployment, which will eventually lead to on-demand computing. Because of the complexity of the new Web services technologies being implemented, IBM has been working with customers on many first-of-a-kind development products that are then fed back into the IBM software development pipeline for products lines such as WebSphere and Tivoli. These new SOA centers are a key aspect of that strategy. Some of the enterprise customers currently working with IBM on SOA projects include Pep Boys, eBay, MCI, and Charles Schwab.

Then, BEA this year also unveiled an SOA practice that offers a framework for designing and building shared application service layers on top of enterprise systems. The practice aims to build smarter and more flexible enterprise systems by restructuring application portfolios using SOA principles.

The HP announcement comes on the heels of survey results that show that SOA implementations are taking longer, and costing more, than enterprises had anticipated. As more companies turn to outside help for their SOA projects, costs are likely to increase even further.