One of the new offerings, HP OpenView DecisionCenter, is designed to help CIOs and operations managers reconcile service level promises with the costs of delivering them.
It takes data from HP Service Desk and other sources to factor costs based on labor and infrastructure requirements. It provides modeling tools to perform what-ifs, such as how much additional people and infrastructure would be required to boost service levels from 99.5% to 99.9%.
HP claims that the difference with project portfolio management offerings is that its cost/service level alignment tools are focused on ongoing services, rather than projects.
Another new product, HP OpenView Application Insight, maps the interactions and dependencies of different software components with other software components and infrastructure. The goal is optimizing the performance of apps and services associated with them.
OpenView Application Insight collects data either through deployment of agents, collection of data through APIs to external sources such as Oracle’s database console, or through end-to-end response time metrics. It can drill down from application to Java component level, or web services-based business services and composite applications that are discovered by HP’s SOA Manager tool.
But for now its web services support is a work in progress. This release will support agent-based discovery of web services, but agent-less discovery (which involves end-to-end metrics and interfaces to run time governance tools, such as HP’s own SOA Manager) still awaits a future release.
Additionally, an existing product, HP OpenView AssetCenter, has been enhanced with a common web client and a new SOAP interface to consume data from external sources that are published as web services.
Additionally, HP has added business service modeling which helps you know all the assets necessary for delivering a specific business service, and some enhancements that further aid identification of versions, patch levels, and applicable software licenses or service contracts.
The goal of service management approaches like HP is to assign a business view to what has traditionally been the domain of data center or network admins.
In fact, it’s been an elusive goal for many years, as the system management vendors have all been utilizing market terms like Agile Enterprise, Business Service Management, Business Technology Optimization, or some variation of the terms to promote their wares.
And what’s interesting is that, with the emergence of PPM, rivals like Mercury are claiming that they are the ones who provide the business level views, not the systems management folks.
Yet, the HPs of the world will claim that service levels all start with a solid base of operational data. HP’s latest round of announcements mark its newest volley to cement that argument.
HP’s new and revised products will ship around September.
