HP Helps Businesses Reduce Risk of Downtime with Enhanced Business Service Management Software

Business Wire, Oct 22, 2007

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today introduced enhanced software to help IT organizations monitor and manage business services to mitigate business risk and reduce the potential costs of service downtime.

The newly enhanced HP Business Service Management (BSM) solution combines industry-leading application, infrastructure and network management software to help customers manage the overall health of their business services. The solution includes major upgrades to HP Operations Center 8.0, HP Network Management Center 8.0, HP Business Availability Center 7.0 and HP Universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) 7.0.

The HP BSM offering is part of the HP Service Management portfolio of software and services that helps IT become a service provider to the business and deliver better business outcomes.

By gaining visibility into the status of business services across networks, servers and applications - from infrastructure performance to end-user experience - IT organizations can prioritize their workloads around the most critical business issues, such as making sure that important transactions can be processed without disruption. HP BSM software helps customers monitor and manage complex business services, such as insurance claim processing, product order and inventory management systems, across heterogeneous and distributed IT environments.

"With so much reliance on technology, businesses today are at risk if the IT system that drives their most critical business processes goes down," said Ramin Sayar, senior director of products, Software, HP. "HP's BSM solution helps IT organizations effectively pinpoint problems across the entire IT stack."

"In a recent survey of IT professionals, IDC found that 41 percent identified end-user calls into the service desk or help desk as their first point of notification of a service disruption or degradation," said Stephen Elliot, research director, Enterprise Management Service, IDC. "In order to become more business aligned, IT organizations must become more proactive in preventing problems. To achieve this, they need to better understand the impact of infrastructure events on business services and resolve them before their customers are affected, through process adoption and integrated management solutions that deliver business service visibility."

New integration and product enhancements

HP Network Management Center 8.0 - has been fully re-engineered to help customers minimize the impact of network device failures on business services and the user experience. It helps IT staff:

* Automatically view on their console only network problems that require operator action based upon recent changes to the network topology;

* Implement and automate event management as described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 definition to solve infrastructure problems faster and more efficiently; and

* Find problems in the network paths that link the elements of composite applications, including those based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to prevent disruptions and slowdowns.

"As a leader in the transmission and distribution of electric energy, Duquesne Light prides itself on superior customer service and reliability, and that starts with the service and reliability of our IT infrastructure," said Kevin Turkovich, manager, IT Infrastructure & Support, Duquesne Light. "We made the decision to deploy HP Network Management Center 8.0 to help us achieve faster mean time to resolution and because it is easy to use, easy to learn and easy to deploy. We were managing our network within two hours after downloading the software."

HP Operations Center 8.0 - helps IT staff understand how infrastructure and server problems impact the business. It helps customers:

* Prioritize fix time based on impact to the business and gain visibility into the relationship between infrastructure and business services through links between HP Operations Center to HP Universal CMDB; and

* Eliminate the need to manually create and maintain the models that make this visibility possible by automating the population and maintenance of the CMDB. This helps minimize disruptions to the business and reduces duplication of effort between silos in IT.

HP Business Availability Center 7.0 - helps IT ensure that business processes and applications are up and running by helping IT:

* Rapidly isolate the area where a problem is occurring with new guided workflow-enabled problem isolation functionality. This new software automatically collects and correlates the information required to solve performance problems quickly and accurately. Through integration with the HP Universal CMDB, it is able to determine recent, related changes that may be causing problems;

* Proactively identify performance problems by automatically discovering user behavior patterns; and

* Ensure the integrity of strategic business services by monitoring the total health of business transactions, enabling IT to gain visibility into the detailed status of all steps of each business transaction. Integration with HP's transaction monitoring product, HP TransactionVision, and HP's business process monitoring product, HP Business Process Insight, makes it easier and faster for customers to manage individual business transactions.