HP Pushes Service Management

Hewlett-Packard

"I see the world as more heterogeneous, not less, and I see our product portfolio reflecting that," said Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's global software business unit, speaking during a keynote address to attendees of the HP Software Forum user conference here.

In the wake of HP's merger with Compaq, HP will continue its efforts to develop OpenView as a vendor-neutral management platform, executives said.

"There is absolute commitment and absolute support, as there always has been, but in the new company I think you'll see even greater focus on that. We will continue to drive our business in a heterogeneous, multiplatform way," said Patty Azzarello, vice president and general manager of OpenView.

In addition to continued investment in its service management strategy, OpenView will invest in storage management and Web services management, as well as in improving OpenView integration and ease-of-use and adding management capabilities for converged voice and data networks, Azzarello said.

As previously reported in CRN, products introduced at the show include HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5, which simplifies the creation of service-level agreements; HP OpenView Storage Data Protector, which enables tape- and disk-based instant-recovery capabilities; and HP OpenView Transaction Analyzer for managing J2EE- and Microsoft .Net-based Web applications.

HP's overall goal for OpenView is that the management platform "will ultimately reconfigure data centers on the fly to bring resources to bear when service levels are not being met," Denzel said.

The concept of service-driven management--also espoused by other network management vendors such as Computer Associates and IBM Tivoli--manages and monitors IT infrastructure according to the impact it has on the business services that run on it.

IT departments can realize significant cost savings through a service-driven management approach by reducing application downtime, improving customer satisfaction, reducing remote operations staff and using existing network resources more efficiently, Azzarello said.

"If you have lots of people gathering lots of data about your storage and network systems, [when a failure occurs you'll have people running around finger-pointing to find the source of the problem," Azzarello said. "Instead, you can relegate that knowledge to tools and pinpoint problems intuitively."

HP executives urged IT departments to view themselves as service providers and business partners rather than infrastructure providers, in order to cut costs and reduce the chances that their companies will choose to outsource their IT departments to external service providers.

HP's message to IT departments to transition themselves into internal service providers will likely produce more business opportunities for solution providers, said Francis McGarry, vice president of TSA, a Houston-based solution provider.

"If [IT departments went to that level they probably would not be our customers anymore, but my suspicion is that one-tenth of 1 percent can actually get there," McGarry said.

TSA also anticipates increased business opportunities as a result of the HP/Compaq merger and the addition of Compaq's sales force, McGarry said.

"We were an exclusive HP shop, so now we're still an exclusive HP shop with a broader offering," McGarry said. "If we were in 20 accounts with HP before, I expect to be in 40 accounts with the new company," he said.