HP Management Platform On Tap

To support its new Adaptive Management Platform, HP launched new products within its OpenView network management family.

The goal is to provide a management platform that better matches a customer's actual computing resources with its application and usage needs, said Nora Denzel, senior vice president of the global software business unit at HP.

"We can take an Itanium machine, for example, that's running Windows, clean it off, put Linux on it and send it over to another application that's not meeting its service levels," Denzel said. "As a result, you really drive your utilization rates up, your complexity goes way down and you get a lot more return on your IT."

HP solution providers should see sales opportunities for services, consulting and education as they transition customers to a service-based management view of their infrastructures, Denzel said.

"With service management, we can monitor and proactively address any network performance issues our customers may have and keep their service level as high as it can be," said Jeff Budd, director of managed services at Logical, a Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based network integrator.

To support its new strategy, HP plans to introduce OpenView Network Node Manager 6.4 and Network Node Manager Extended Topology 2.0, which provide root-cause analysis and predictive management capabilities to find potential problems before they degrade performance levels.

HP OpenView Web Service Management Engine provides a means for customers to add manageability into Web services built on protocols such as SOAP and WSDL. HP also plans management tools for the Sun ONE Web services platform.

Pricing and shipment information was not available at press time.