OpenView gets services face-lift

Aggressively guiding customers to embrace its Adaptive Enterprise strategy, Hewlett-Packard is introducing products that ease the transition to a services-oriented architecture.

At its HP Software Forum in Chicago next week, the company will unveil more than 30 new and enhanced HP OpenView products and services. The host of offerings is designed to correlate and control all IT and infrastructure assets, create integrated service management, and utilize business processes to allocate resources for automated responses within an enterprise.

“[Customers] must know when infrastructure is being impacted and be able to respond quickly and to manage technologies that pertain to business transactions, such as Web services,” said Bill Emmett, solutions marketing manager at Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP.

Leading the HP product parade is HP OpenView Network Node Manager Advanced 7.0, which features a bundled package of fault, performance, and problem diagnosis supported by deeper Layer 2 and Layer 3 fault management.

The updated software offers improved root-cause analysis and a diagnostics capability that allows users to assess on a path-by-path basis where troubles exist between two nodes on a network, Emmett said.

HP OpenView Service Navigator Pack, an add-on to the existing Service Navigator, will help customers graphically construct views to help correlate, prioritize, and keep track of services.

To help manage networks from a services view, HP is announcing HP OpenView Performance Insight 4.6. The updated version offers more meaningful reports about a wider range of performance frameworks.

Because the road to enabling an “Adaptive infrastructure” is littered with open systems and numerous vendors — and must start with core software and services control — HP is well-suited to deliver on its promise, said Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Boulder, Colo-based Enterprise Management Associates.

“HP is very focused on trying to position themselves as a strategic guide post to evolving into that [on-demand/utility-computing] space,” Drogseth said. “It [involves] network systems applications, management control, storage, security. It’s really the whole ball of wax, and there’s literally no vendor in the world who can give you everything.”