HP Helps CIOs Optimize Business Outcomes of IT with New Project and Portfolio Management Software

Business Wire, Nov 29, 2006

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today unveiled new project and portfolio management software that gives customers real-time visibility and control over the entire IT portfolio to help reduce the business risk of IT project failure.

Available immediately, Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 provides chief information officers and other IT executives with sophisticated project, demand and portfolio management as well as an integrated approach to managing projects across their lifecycles.

The software addresses some of the biggest challenges of delivering clear and measurable business results from IT by helping to avoid the stalled or failed projects, and the waste of time, budget and resources, that can come with the use of rudimentary project management tools and manual processes.

"To prioritize how they'll support business goals, senior IT and business executives need visibility into all the demand for IT, and they need to match that to resource supply, including both budget and skilled staff," said Matt Light, research director, Gartner Inc. "Today, these executives can more strategically select an ideal project portfolio using solutions that help compute alternate scenarios of proposed projects, given resource capacity forecast from in-flight projects and other work commitments, and factoring in risks and expected returns."

"Operating more than 1,200 supermarkets in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic United States, Food Lion relies on portfolio management to help deliver the freshest and best quality products to its customers," said Pat Tagnani, director, Project Management Office, Food Lion, LLC. "Using Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center provides us with real-time visibility into all of our strategic initiatives; we can quickly identify the right projects and staff them with the right people."

New and enhanced functionality in Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0 helps IT organizations:

* Govern IT by managing strategic projects and operational activities and aggregating operational demand and proposal requests through a single user interface;

* Improve efficiency by automatically optimizing the selection of projects and operational activities through the new portfolio optimization engine, based on user-defined criteria such as budget allocation to certain corporate initiatives;

* Achieve and maintain regulatory compliance across field-level audit trails to track all changes to projects and critical applications;

* Aggregate legacy desktop data, such as Microsoft[R] Project and other project data sources, to create a unified view across both strategic projects and operational activities; and

* Adopt either top-down or bottom-up project planning and execution with a flexible approach to portfolio management.

"This new software from HP helps our customers address their most challenging IT governance problems and maximize the returns from their IT portfolio," said Deborah Traub, vice president, Product Strategy, Management Products, Software, HP. "Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center is a key part of our strategy to help our customers optimize the business outcomes of IT."

In fact, HP Consulting & Integration is standardizing on Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center for its Architecture & Governance Practice as well as being integrated as a strategic element of HP Services' solution for IT Shared Services Centers.

"As a leading e-commerce company in South Korea, IT is the business for INTERPARK Corporation," said Jeong Won El, director, IT Supporting Division/Technology Division, INTERPARK Corporation. "Rather than looking at portfolio management as an annual exercise, Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center lets us evaluate new proposals against in-flight projects without having to do a lot of detail work. This helps us make smart decisions about how to deploy our resources in real-time."

Product availability

Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center may be delivered as an in-house deployment or through Mercury Managed Services, which enables customers to access Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center software as a hosted service over the Internet and leverage an expert team of service professionals.

This product is also available through HP's network of partner companies, including India-based Wipro.

"Wipro is pleased to be a preferred HP partner for helping customers upgrade to Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center 7.0. Wipro has a very strong relationship with HP in providing value-based governance solutions using this product," said Suraj Prakash, vice president, Quality Consulting Group, Wipro. "We have leveraged our patented PMO solution, Process Packs[R], built on Mercury Project and Portfolio Management Center, to deliver best practices and accelerated results to our customers."

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended Oct. 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $91.7 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.