Looking Ahead At OpenView, Partners Urge HP To Speed Up Compaq Integration

Hewlett-Packard

"I'd like to see them get through the integration issues as quickly as possible," said Matthew Jacobson, general manager of the Enterprise Solutions Group at Melillo Consulting, a solution provider based in Somerset, N.J. "They and we are in competitive markets, and if HP spends time focused internally it might miss opportunities and get leapfrogged," he said.

The merger will likely increase business opportunities for HP channel partners because the addition of Compaq's sales force will extend the combined company's reach, said Francis McGarry, vice president of TSA, a Houston-based solution provider.

"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.

Sales representatives brought in from Compaq are already calling on solution providers, said Jeffrey Budd, practice director at Logical, a Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based solution provider.

"We're seeing Compaq sales reps now in a position where they have to sell OpenView, and they're looking for partners [to help them," he said.

HP executives at the conference outlined the company's vision to provide platform-neutral OpenView management software that is focused on service management.

"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.

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's integration features 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 recent show included 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 one in which 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 International 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."