HCL Technologies Ltd. ("HCL") has announced the launch of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) Competency Centre for Retailers at this week's National Retail Federation Convention. The Competency Centre is designed to guide retailers in the areas of SOA tool selection, development methodology and project execution, leveraging an industry-specific set of services and the deep expertise of HCL team members in areas relevant to SOA and BPM.

"SOA and BPM testing are very complex, time-consuming processes due to inadequate, legacy homegrown frameworks," said Vikram Duvvoori, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Middleware & SOA Practice, HCL Technologies. "As they require a fresh perspective towards development, testing, security and other aspects of project life cycle, HCL has focused on accelerating the process for our retail customers through specific tools and technologies for testing and security for SOA applications."

Specifically, one of HCL's solution frameworks, HCL's xFIT, addresses testing and security problems retailers will face when implementing SOA and BPM. With HCL's xFIT framework to manage and automate SOA and services testing, companies can develop, orchestrate and maintain distributed test cases. The framework offers multi-platform support (UNIX, LINUX, AIX and Windows), is lightweight and minimally intrusive, and is also easy to learn and deploy.

Furthermore, HCL's xFIT provides companies with the ability to run test cases on multiple Systems under Test (SUT) configurations.