1. 1HP Confidential
COPE - Converged Open Platform for Enterprise
Lei Xia, Ye Tian
EB, ES, Best Shore Services China
lxia@hp.com, ye.tian4@hp.com
Abstract
The converged open platform for enterprise (COPE) is an approach to facilitate efficient enterprise software development in a
platform as a service way. This converged open platform is established to address the chaotic status of nowadays software
development in a big company, and it is also an architecture model for cloud and mobility systems.
Problem statement
Today, more and more software services are moving to cloud and mobility systems. In this kind of system, there are
many common services to be considered, e.g. user service, security service, logging service, searching service,
business process service, system monitoring services and so on. Developing these services again and again in
different teams and departments costs money and make it inefficient. Reasons are: the team need a high level design
team, the developing term is too long, and the teams spend a lot of time on infrastructure side rather than the
business side. If we have a converged open platform for enterprise services, then cost will be cut, services can be
requested and deployed at the very first time, and solutions should be stable because they are open and verified by
many projects. This approach will make the company a community leader in technology side and benefit more in
business.
Our solution
Our COPE solution is a new type of as a service solution; developing teams can not only configure to use our
services directly, but also contribute to the service repository. As shown in Figure 1, the COPE architectural model
includes: the application layer, the converged open platform service Layer, and the infrastructure datacenter layer.
Figure 1: Architectural Model of Converged Open Platform for Enterprise
The UI of the application layer uses HTML5/CSS3 and JavaScript to be able to make our applications cross
platform both on mobility system and large screen device. JQuery is the recommended JavaScript library that
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simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web
development. Enyo and Mojo can be used to develop applications on mobile phones or tablets. WebKit is an open
source web browser engine.
The converged open platform service layer is the core layer of the model, it provides:
• With the common service request interface, developer team can request common services as they needed,
e.g. asynchronous logging service, distributed cache or storage service with mongoDB; the project manager
can provide their project information to the request system, the request system will then grant access to the
services for the team.
• The common demo service means develop team can directly use the demo environment to accelerate their
demo without developing the complex service module; this will give the team a great help to win
competitive bidding.
• Common API service provides a way for developing team to contribute to the open platform service
repository. This module takes responsibility to manage, grant access and upgrade the changes to the
running server both of bug fix and new feature development.
• Mobilization solution service provides common solutions for mobility devices.
• Authentication/Authorization module provides user authentication, single sign on solution and session
management solution.
• Solution Admin & Monitoring, this module provides permission based user tracking, cloud service
monitoring, business analysis and reporting and dynamic service marketing update.
• Web service connector is used for COPE system to connect with outer systems through web services.
The infrastructure layer provides datacenter services. We will get all of our services deployed across datacenters to
provide consistent ready services.
The COPE architectural model combines mobility and traditional enterprise system. It gives the whole organization
a recommended solution model to help them build and reuse their service; it is built with open source technologies
and is open to the whole organization or community, be a kind of developer driven converged platform innovation.
Evidence the solution works
Figure 2 and Figure 3 shows how we place the converged open platform model in our two separate projects.
Figure 2: Architecture of EVOC 5in1 on IPAD Figure 3: Architecture of Software Support Service Platform
In the EVOC on IPAD project, the client uses HTML5/Enyo/JQuery to build a browser based application, it can run
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both on Touchpad (webOS) and IPAD (compile to use UIWebView in iOS SDK to load web page); the client uses
HTTPS to connect with the backend middle server which is responsible to delegate service request to EVOC system
through web services and send back result in JSON object. In addition, the middle server also provides user
authentication (through HP enterprise directory), logging, distributed cache, email notification; all these services
are already provided by COPE. This makes development of the backend system very easy.
Competitive approaches
To our knowledge the converged open platform for enterprise provides a better architectural model that is suitable
for mobility services and traditional enterprise services. I don’t see any such product in HP, and we are not Google
or Amazon cloud service system (GAE, AWS), they can be integrated in our model; what we want is try to be
ourselves in making a converged open platform for enterprise service to accelerate, cut cost, and be consistent and
open.
Current status
We have implemented some part of the common services platform, and we have adopted this model to two projects
in BAS China. We have a clear vision and architecture model of the COPE system, but we still need time and fund
to get the other parts of the model created.
Next steps
The next major step is to complete and make it perfect for more services and to prototype the demo service and API
service module.
References
[1] Lei Xia, project document: common service in a cloud system
[2] Lei Xia, project document: using COPE model in your projects