SEATTLE: HP says that service management will be the key growth engine for
its HP OpenView software suite. The announcement was made at HP Software Forum
2002 in Seattle, its annual software convention. Though HP has been mentioning
service management for the last 4-5 years, the concept has caught the attention
of analysts quite recently and is now touted as the new mantra for the
enterprise CIOs.
HP also announced new products in its OpenView suite that would help fuel the
growth in the area of service management. Among the new products announced are
HP OpenView Storage Protector and HP OpenView Storage Area Manager. The former
is a successor to an earlier product, Omniback II, that delivers higher levels
of recovery in a services driven environment. The latter controls and monitors
the availability, usage and cost of multi vendor resources across the storage
available on a network.
Software Buisness unit vice president, Nora M Denzel, assured users of HP’s
total commitment to its software business. This is the first major conference
after the completion of the HP-Compaq merger. "In the new HP, our customers
are everywhere and we have an incredible obsessive focus on our customers."
After the merger, HP has now become the 5th largest software vendor after
Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. Outlining HP’s software strategy, Nora Denzel
added that HP would invest in platforms, infrastructure on demand and some parts
of middleware while it would partner for business applications and some
middleware components.
HP OpenView believes that in today’s business environment, the need for
cost control will force CIOs in the enterprise to change from being
infrastructure providers to become service providers and ultimately to being
business partners. The path to this transition, as HP OpenView sees it is
through service management.
According to HP OpenView business unit, vice president, Patty Azzarello, CIOs
need to understand the new way to communicate the value that they bring to the
enterprise. "Service management has gone mainstream and the RoI in service
management is absolutely compelling," says Azzarello. In the view of HP
OpenView, implementation of service management would mean that the IT department
enters the business planning process, delivers services for competitive
advantage and is also the best way to insurance proof the CIOs career.