HP Unveils IT Financial Management Solution

Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest technology company, announced a solution in its IT Financial Management portfolio, HP Financial Planning and Analysis, designed to help CIOs to run IT like a business and demonstrate the business value of IT services. HP says the solution brings together software and services to provide improved visibility, governance, accountability and predictability to IT finance.

The company's FP&A solution is the first offering in the ITFM portfolio designed to help IT organizations use business analytics to improve decision-making, operate more efficiently and align more closely with the rest of the business, molding IT into a performance-based, metrics-driven organization. With the HP IT Financial Management portfolio, businesses can take on financial analysis, project portfolio management and asset management capabilities to drive out inefficiencies in IT spending, HP said. HP also announced a newly enhanced version of HP Project Portfolio Management Center 8.0 software with improved financial and resource management capabilities.

HP FP&A software combines a financial planning and analysis capability linked to a financial data model. It consolidates financial information from project, asset and configuration management systems, as well as ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. The software automates the process of consolidating financial information across labor and technology assets for financial analysis. HP FP&A can be run as a stand-alone application or in conjunction with other HP software products such as HP Project Portfolio Management Center, HP Asset Manager and HP Configuration Management System.

"Customers can achieve successful IT financial management with HP's market-leading software products and recognized consulting expertise in business intelligence, service management and IT software implementation," said HP's executive vice president of software and solutions Thomas Hogan. "We help CIOs manage the business of IT with the same rigor as any line of business."

In a survey of more than 200 IT leaders worldwide conducted by PSB Research in May 2009, nearly half of the respondents said they lack investment rigor and have no form of portfolio management in place for aligning IT investment decisions to business priorities. In addition, while 66 percent of senior IT leaders said IT-spending transparency is "very important" to their business stakeholders, only 44 percent reported that their stakeholders are "very satisfied" with their organizations' spending transparency.

Jeffrey Johnson, deputy chief information officer and vice president of Operations and Infrastructure at Constellation Energy, a Baltimore-based supplier of energy products, said with HP IT Financial Management, their company is driving the financial accountability of the technology organization. "We've benchmarked our IT spending in relationship to our operational expenses, and it is substantially lower than that of our peers," he said. "Our unit costs - meaning cost per desktop, per server, per gigabyte of storage - have dropped 14 percent."