HP Expands OpenView With Partnerships And Services

Hewlett-Packard this week continues to expand its IT management software and services business with a partnering program to improve business-process visibility and new offerings in its IT service-management product line.

HP is working separately with several providers of business-intelligence software, including Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and SAS, to develop products that will be optimized to work with HP's OpenView Business Process Insight software.

Separately, at the IT Service Management Forum in Chicago on Tuesday, HP revealed expansions of its OpenView portfolio, including an ITSM Express Pack for Consolidated Service Desk and the creation of an ITSM assessment services offering.

The news came a day after HP revealed that it would spend about a half a billion dollars to bolster its management software portfolio by acquiring Peregrine Systems Inc. and AppIQ Inc.

HP's ongoing software and services initiative will improve its Adaptive Enterprise vision for customers seeking to improve automation of their IT infrastructures around defined business processes, including the IT Infrastructure Library framework, says Yale Tankus, VP of alliances and partnerships for HP's management software business. "There is an increasing correlation between what is going on inside of those specific business processes back to the overall performance of the company," he says.

Under an agreement with HP, Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and SAS are expected to introduce by the end of the year products that use HP's BPI software to provide real-time and historical views into business-process status and results using data collected by their own software offerings.

The first offerings include Business Objects XI for operations business intelligence with OpenView BPI, which is intended to let organizations more tightly link business intelligence with business operations to deliver real-time process monitoring, and link performance management with business operations for industry-specific products.

Cognos 8 Scorecarding with OpenView BPI will enable businesses to monitor, measure, and manage their business performance using predetermined metrics and assigned actions.

Hyperion Business Performance Management with OpenView BPI is aimed at letting companies gain continuous visibility into business performance and to rapidly analyze performance gaps.

SAS 9 Business Intelligence Platform with OpenView BPI is intended to allow business to analyze and manage process cost at multiple levels of granularity.

"These will be off-the-shelf products that are being enhanced to work with BPI," Tankus says. "Today there are lots of products that provide historical views into business processes within an IT organization, and these products will help by providing a real-time view as well."

Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager for HP's management software business, says new products and services within the IT service management component of its OpenView portfolio can help businesses cut implementation time and costs in half.

HP is introducing the ITSM Express Pack for consolidated service desk, which combines OpenView software with best practices as defined by ITIL for a product than be rapidly implemented to provide insight into incident, problem change, configuration, and service management. The offering includes preconfigured OpenView Service Desk, reporting capabilities, best-practices documentation, consulting, implementation, and support services, Emmett says. Also integrated is a configuration-management database.

Given HP's ongoing push expand its software-management strategy, Jim Grant, VP and general manager of BMC Software Inc.'s service-management business unit, says he wonders where Monday's planned acquisition of Peregrine will fit within the strategy.

"I think we see HP validating BMC's configuration-management database strategy we've had in place for about a year and half," Grant says. "But now HP has to reconcile a set of strategies it has been trying to promote for the past six months with a set of strategies from Peregrine. I think their stated goal of a 12- to 18-month integration [of the companies] is optimistic."

Another piece of HP's most recent push is an ITSM assessment services portfolio that will allow business to tap into HP's services consulting and integration business at four levels of assessment, ranging from a single wide-focus management workshop to an in-depth assessment that includes multiple face-to-face interviews and detailed data-gathering exercises.

Emmett says the services will let business gain an understanding into specific requirements necessary to meet specified service-level objectives within their IT organizations and identify technology gaps.