Real-time business agility is HP’s mantra

CHICAGO: Any change in the business process should automatically reflect a change in the IT environment with or without the involvement of the CIO. For that to happen, the enterprise needs to be truly adaptive. This was the main thrust at the inaugural session of HP Software Forum 2003, which started off in Chicago today.
Adaptive Enterprise or real time business agility is the next wave for HP’s OpenView software suite. Outlining the need for real time business agility, Nora Denzel, Senior Vice President of HP Software Global Business Unit said, ' the compelling point is that IT is agile to what is happening to the business process.' Building on its Adaptive Enterprise strategy introduced last month, HP also introduced 30 new and enhanced HP OpenView products at the annual HP software forum.

A look at the spending pattern of a typical IT department would indicate that 70 per cent or more is spent on managing the existing infrastructure and its people and less than 30 per cent on new IT initiatives. Talking about the need to reverse the ratio, Nora Denzel emphasized that adaptive enterprises need to spend more on management software and developing new IT applications that will drive the enterprise forward.

The Adaptive Enterprise management roadmap has been built around the Darwin Reference Architecture, which is HP’s overall framework for enterprise agility. HP has chartered three evolutionary stages of adaptive management software functionality. The first stage is described as Business stability in which the thrust is on operations centric management to reduce the total cost of ownership. 65 percent of the enterprises worldwide are estimated to be in this stage of the Darwin reference architecture.

In the second stage, known as Business efficiency, the focus is on service centric management that seeks to improve business efficiency and effectiveness by integrating and aligning the IT infrastructure with the services IT delivers to the enterprise. 30 per cent of the enterprises are believed to be in this stage. The third stage is termed as the Business agility stage in which enterprises are taken to the ultimate state of management fitness by using business process awareness to ensure that IT infrastructure automatically applies the right resources to the right problem.

Commenting on the performance of the HP OpenView business unit, Nora Denzel said that there has been a 9 per cent year on year growth. One of the main reasons for the growth has been OpenView performance in the Windows environment. Last years merger with Compaq enabled HP OpenView to make impressive inroads in the Windows segment. Apart from revenue growth, the cost structure for OpenView suite of products has been kept under control by moving part of the development to India according to Nora Denzel.

(CNS)