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WASHINGTON, D.C.-Hewlett-Packard is announcing several new platforms during the opening day of its HP Software Universe 2010 conference, including HP Test Data Management, which accelerates application testing, and HP Business Service Management 9.0, which gives IT administrators tools to manage application performance.
HP used its week of presentations at Maryland’s Gaylord Center to roll out its new management solutions, which attempt to leverage the enterprise’s increasingly hybridized environment. HP Business Service Management (BSM) 9.0 offers IT administrators the ability to manage application performance, as well as use collaboration tools to deliver data to appropriate team members, even on mobile devices. It automates the event resolution process, in theory reducing troubleshooting costs, and eliminates redundant events.
BSM 9.0 also offers a run-time service model, which updates the complete run-time environment of the application service, whether the application is running on- or off-premises, or in a virtual environment; this integrates with the HP Configuration Management System, giving IT administrators a more accurate picture of the current IT service state. It includes integrated virtualization support for various levels of the IT service tier, including not only applications, but also servers and networks.
“IT delivery is fundamentally changing,” Bill Veghte, the newly appointed executive vice president of HP Software & Solutions, said during a June 15 press event that opened the conference. “With a unified view of your IT portfolio, even if you got a perfect picture of it, three minutes later it would be inaccurate.”
BSM 9.0, Veghte said, “can give IT organizations a near-real-time view and do it across hybrid environments.” The key with enterprise IT, he added, “is that it’s not only in the traditional data center, but also a virtualized environment and the cloud.”
Reflecting his previous history with Microsoft, where he helped oversee the development of several succeeding editions of Windows, Veghte also emphasized BSM 9.0’s interface, which he described as presenting controls and tools “in a visually compelling, clear way for folks.”
New software included with BSM 9.0 ranges from HP BAC Anywhere, a service that administrators can use to monitor their external Web applications from anywhere offsite, to HP Operations Manager i 9.0, which utilizes smart plug-ins (SPIs) to automatically discover application changes.
“Innovating by using new technologies offers organizations many benefits, but also introduces new complexities that cannot go unchecked,” Erik Frieberg, vice president of HP’s Business Technology Optimization Operations, Software and Solutions, wrote in a June 15 statement ahead of the conference opening. “The HP BSM portfolio helps clients by providing a simplified, integrated and automated technology environment.”
HP Test Data Management (TDM), another piece of software being announced at the conference, automates the process of collecting test data from live applications, and accelerates application testing through a combination of masking and automated data extraction.
In theory, by reducing the time required to extract the large amounts of distributed data needed for testing, TDM reduces business risk and project delays; it also increases security through the masking of sensitive data, and reduces the storage footprint and cost of data storage for databases used in testing environments. Lastly, the combination of automation and risk-reduction frees up resources to focus on other tasks.
“Executives need to drive new innovations quickly without adding risk,” Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager of HP’s Business Technology Optimization Applications, Software and Solutions, wrote in a June 15 statement. “With HP Test Data Management and new partnership with CollabNet, enterprise software teams can better collaborate and speed delivery of high quality software to power organizational innovation.”