Users glimpse HP Adaptive Enterprise

Customers attempting to re-architect infrastructure and business processes in a more services-centric form are facing a daunting task.

During last week’s HP Software Forum in Chicago, Hewlett-Packard customers saw HP OpenView and other new offerings designed to enhance HP’s utility computing and services-focused Adaptive Enterprise strategy.

But uncertainty still plagues issues with infrastructure and services integration, speed of development, and asserting a balanced level of automation, users said.

“I don’t know that I necessarily want Adaptive Enterprise and underlying technology making decisions for me,” said Tim Hagan, vice president of IT operations and engineering at Zurich Life in Schaumburg, Ill. “I want it making suggestions.”

Many HP customers said they want to phase out a “reactionary” mode of diagnosing system problems.

“We still have two diverse roles of hardware and software, and we’re trying to integrate [them],” said Jason Kennedy, systems management analyst at Best Buy Canada/Future Shop in Burnaby, British Columbia. “We want to retire other monitoring systems … that’s when we’ll make the paradigm shift to the service level.”

As the enterprise  embraces application-focused management, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and CA are using virtualization as a weapon that allows IT to adapt and react to circumstances it was not built for, said analyst Tim Grieser at IDC in Framingham, Mass.

Grieser said HP’s “huge presence” in managed infrastructure and its open systems could make HP the vendor of choice for users with heterogeneous environments.