Growth through service management for HP OpenView

At its annual software convention, the HP Software Forum 2002 in Seattle, HP has announced Service Management to be the key growth engine for its HP OpenView software suite. Though HP has been mentioning service management for the last four-five 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 and capabilities in its OpenView suite that would help fuel the growth it expects in the area of Service Management. Amongst the new products announced are HP OpenView Storage Protector and HP OpenView Storage Area Manager. The former is a successor to an earlier product called 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.

Being the first major conference of the new HP after the successful completion of the HP-Compaq merger, Nora M Denzel, VP (Software Business), HP, assured users of HP's total commitment to its software business. "In the new HP, our customers are everywhere and we have a incredible obsessive focus on our customers."

After the merger, HP has now become the fifth largest software vendor after Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle. Outlining HP's software strategy, 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 transition 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 Patty Azzarello, VP (HP OpenView), 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."

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 CIO's career.

E Abraham Mathew


(CNS)