In-Depth
HP Shows 40 New “Adaptive Enterprise” Products, Buddies Up to SAP
Company says products can cut IT operations costs by 30 percent.
Hewlett-Packard this week dusted off 40 products which it says take HP customers closer to an adaptive enterprise, able to knock 30 percent from their IT operations costs by automating their responses to real-time business demands.
It was almost as if HP had found the press releases that went with IBM’s Project Symphony initiative from two weeks ago and done a find and replace on the words “on demand” and put in “adaptive enterprise” instead.
At the time, IBM added the acquired ThinkControl products to its mix, and introduced orchestration products which can automatically provision new systems. Big Blue added business services support, better security, and a level of optimization to its product lines.
Now HP is doing much the same, introducing its new products under the headings of people, process, and technology, bringing out a Web-based help desk; IT Services Management methods and certification for customers to support business services best practice; preconfigured skeleton processes for the OpenView service desk; an agility assessment service that can constantly monitor how agile an organization is; a new partnership with SAP; and a host of software product offerings, mostly updates.
Right in among the software are two offerings from recent acquisitions: Talking Blocks and the Select Access assets it bought from Baltimore Technologies. The Talking Blocks technology has emerged as OpenView Management Integration Platform designed to manage Web services, and the Select Access tools (billed by the same name with OpenView in front of it) and featured as HP’s new identity management software.
Other software products added included a combination of Compaq’s Insight Manager, linked with HP’s TopTools and Service Control Manager and collectively renamed the HP Systems Insight Manager. Effectively this is Compaq’s original idea extended to run across Windows, HP-UX, and any other Unix and control the same operating systems, and plugging straight into HP’s OpenView.
HP also upgraded Openview Operations and its Web JetAdmin to version 7.5 and was joined by Advance Transformer, the Arab National Bank, Avaya, the National Bureau of Statistics of China, and Perdata as customers to sing the praises of the initiative.
The SAP and HP partnership was described as combining the toolsets and methodologies from the HP Adaptive Enterprise with SAP’s adaptive business service strategy, supposedly spanning networks, systems, middleware, databases and enterprise software. There were few additional details available.
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Rethink Research Associates (www.rethinkresearch.biz) provides analyst and research publications and consultancy/advisory services on enterprise IT, wireless technology, and broadband digital media.