HP blends Mercury, Openview software

Did HP swallow Mercury, or did Mercury swallow HP?

Since the acquisition was completed last November, you have to wonder. After all, HP has adopted Mercury’s nomenclature and now talks a lot about BTO (Business Technology Optimization) — which is basically a fancy way of saying “business and IT alignment.”

Tuesday’s announcement at HP’s Technology@Work conference in Berlin was no exception: HP unveiled a broad array of professional services and product offerings that show progress was made integrating the software formerly known as “OpenView” with Mercury’s project portfolio management and change management offerings. HP now groups all that technology under the rubric of BTO Service Management.

HP executives have said all along that Mercury’s technology for change management and application performance management were important elements behind HP’s decision to buy the company and key to the company’s future plans for OpenView.

HP has also gone hog-wild with the term “service,” by which the company means a total solution that includes both HP software and consulting. New services unveiled include Demand and Portfolio Management, Application Transition Management, Business Service Management, Traditional IT Service Management, and Service Driven Operations. All of those have been concocted within the just-released ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) v3 framework of best practices for IT management.

The company’s liberal use of the “service” terminology to describe combinations of traditional consulting services and also products tracks closely to that of competitor IBM, which has recently taken to selling “service products,” or standardized packages of offerings in areas like Network Convergence Services and Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony Services Product.

The Business Information Optimization portion of the announcement was more focused on product: Neoview, a new software/hardware bundle that (along with HP professional services) provides a complete data warehousing solution. This platform promises high performance business intelligence using HP Integrity and ProLiant servers coupled with HP StorageWorks products. And thanks to HP’s acquisition last year of Knightsbridge Solutions, the company has 700 specialized BI consultants at its disposal.

Finally, HP also extended its Adaptive Infrastructure initiative for enterprise datacenters. The most significant additions were quick time-to-market bundles for three common enterprise deployments: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Oracle E-Business, and SAP R/3. Also, a new maturity model, tailored by HP professional services, is intended to help datacenters optimize resources and increased datacenter automation.