The Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) abstracts the hardware from the service availability middleware and makes each independent of the other. HPI Benefits: Shorter development cycles Development cost savings Lower total cost of ownership Improved design flexibility Reduced development risk Faster innovation Benefits to Independent Software Vendors and Network Equipment Providers Adopting HPI: Discovery provides the capability to automatically discover and enumerate various hardware resources present within a hardware platform along with the management capabilities. Monitoring allows the capability to query various hardware resources to obtain their current health status, performance, etc. Management capabilities allow for appropriate manipulation of the state of a variety of management instruments such as sensors, controls, displays, annunciators, etc. Typically, services specified by the HPI are implemented as libraries in the hardware platform. These services serve up the hardware information in a standard way so that a user application does not have to be aware of the specifics of the underlying hardware.