New Tools To Manage IT Assets

Maritime Lief Assurance Co. continues to grow, and so do its IT systems. To get a better handle on its IT assets, the $1.2 billion provider of insurance and financial services earlier this year implemented Hewlett-Packard's OpenView management software throughout its IT operations.

Maritime expects more help from HP as the vendor rolls out elements of its Adaptive Management Platform, which was introduced last week. The platform is a package of updated OpenView and Utility Data Center software that treats data centers as a single organism rather than as a collection of individual body parts.

A primary goal of Maritime Life Assurance's IT department is to develop and deploy via the Internet applications that help its agents sell more products and services. But before the company could do that effectively, it needed a better way to manage its IT systems. "Maritime is very dependent on its agencies to sell our products, and we're delivering more and more apps to these agencies to help them sell," technology services manager Brad Elliott says. "But our infrastructure was getting so complicated that we didn't even know sometimes when a component went down."

HP's Utility Data Center software already lets companies aggregate servers, storage, and networks as well as create and delete virtual devices to handle changing data-processing workloads. Adaptive Management Platform will go further during the next 18 months by introducing virtualization, automatic-provisioning, and service-management apps. HP last week also released several upgrades to OpenView that address the management of network nodes, Web services, and middleware.

In May, Maritime Life Assurance implemented OpenView to monitor its networking equipment, servers, and certain applications. It plans to implement pieces of Adaptive Management Platform during the next two years.

"We want to be able to monitor Web services or application-to-application communication through a Soap server to measure how long it takes the applications to communicate with each other," Elliott says. "You may know when you have a badly performing application, but you don't know where the problem is coming from." Elliott wouldn't say how much his company will spend on Adaptive Management Platform software and services.