Cyber News Service
NEW DELHI: The latest arsenal from the HP OpenView family of products is its VantagePoint, which is essentially an e-commerce management tool. Already launched worldwide, the product will be launched in India on March 9, 2000. "In the rapidly changing IT scenario, IT applications, which were in the back-office, have now assumed front-office significance and there is a growing need for such applications," says Arun Oberoi, vice-president and general manager, worldwide software sales & marketing, Hewlett Packard.
With every company getting onto the Internet bandwagon, competition is just a click away. Besides, getting to know customer/traffic interaction is a critical aspect of maintaining and retaining traffic to the site. Getting to know this information is a challenge for most companies and providing this in real-time is the promise of VantagePoint! Recently HP also acquired the competency to provide output management services by acquiring the US-based company Dazel. This new feature will monitor the output at the users’ end by providing feedback on whether a particular page is accessible or not or provide feedback on the print quality of a particular page.
Worldwide, HP is targeting three market segments for VantagePoint, the electronic enterprises; the value proposition service providers like infrastructure providers and ASPs; and the WinTel mid-market space. Oberoi expects the ASP segment to emerge as the biggest potential market in terms of manageability since 50 per cent of the world’s IT services would be done online in a couple of years time.
In India, however, the order of target segments would be the WinTel segment, new enterprises, and service providers. WinTel represents the biggest potential market in India.
Yet, says Oberoi, "Though WinTel is the biggest potential market, currently 50 percent of the business in India will come from the new enterprises. The rest will be divided between the WinTel segment and the service providers." Besides this, HP is also targeting software developers to embed the software in their products. To this end, talks are on with leading software developers in Hyderabad and Bangalore.
HP OpenView will have selective partners for the product. It has already inked an agreement with TCS as its implementation partner for the new enterprises, with HCL Comnet to target service providers, and with HCL infosystems to target the WinTel segment. An agreement with Wipro is being reworked on to target enterprises based on Sun systems. HP OpenView VantagePoint is part of the company’s "e-services" strategy.
The company’s focus in this strategy has been changing with the times. During 1998, the company’s focus was to concentrate on network management. By 1999, with the Internet boom everywhere, the shift has been towards e-services management. During this era, the most critical factor is time in deploying solutions and HP claims that its OpenView’s architecture allows deployment in weeks while competitors take months.
HP puts the size of the software and services manageability market in India today at $10-15 million, which is expected to increase phenomenally in the next couple of years. Right now, HP OpenView’s focus is rather on the "market-making" activity. The company has planned a number of awareness-generating forums targeted at service providers and enterprises and expects the returns to pour in by the next quarter.