Enterprises around the world are seeing diminishing returns from traditional IT approaches, where the proliferation of departmental or application-specific computing silos has resulted in under utilization, spiraling administrative costs, and major impediments to change. In an attempt to break out of this cycle, many organizations are rushing to consolidate IT but too often end up with nothing more than larger silos in fewer locations. While this may produce some economic value, it does little to improve IT agility.

Another important trend in both enterprise-application architecture and governance is adoption of a service oriented architecture (SOA), in which services can be easily assembled into new, composite applications. SOA may be viewed as a consolidation response to the software redundancies often created by silo applications. Fundamentally, SOA changes the traditional monolithic application development model to one in which business functions are developed once and then shared across multiple business processes, dramatically improving efficiency, interoperability, and agility while driving standardization.

Together HP and Oracle deliver the core elements of a broader service-oriented IT strategy. One that supports consolidation but goes further to embrace next-generation data center capabilities - a 24 x 7 lights - out computing environment in which standardization, automation, and virtualization break down silos and enable a supply chain of IT services. To help you move toward this new model, HP and Oracle offer a set of complementary strategies-the HP Adaptive Infrastructure and Oracle Grid Computing.