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Hewlett-Packard at its HP Software Universe conference in Vienna on Dec. 12 will lay out for users the software rationalization and rebranding effort it is undertaking as a result of its acquisition of Mercury Interactive.
HP will seek to assert its presence as what is now the sixth-largest software company in the world by organizing its primary software offerings around helping CIOs pull together operations, applications and strategic planning, according to Magdy Assem, worldwide director of product marketing for HP Software in Roseville, Calif.
As a part of its rebranding effort, HP chose to drop the longstanding OpenView brand as it seeks to broaden its presence in customer accounts. Instead, HP will group its offerings initially around three “Lifecycles” intended to help CIOs improve the business effectiveness of IT investments.
The first three life cycles focus on change, configuration, IT service, performance and availability.
The life cycles are about enabling “the CIO to optimize the business outcome of IT by making the right balance between operations, applications and strategy. They will enable the CIO to transform their own organization to optimize business outcome, not IT outcome,” Assem said.
HP Software intends to develop additional life cycles, which are essentially playbooks that describe best practices for functional areas as well the products and services required to achieve the best results.
In rationalizing the combined 240 or so products from the OpenView and Mercury portfolios, HP will also launch nine new “Software Centers” that combine products and integration services aimed at specific types of buyers within the enterprise.
Each of the nine software centers is composed of a single dashboard, integrated applications and a common foundation. The nine centers are HP Project and Portfolio Management Center, HP SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) Center, HP Performance Center, HP Quality Center, HP Business Availability Center, HP Operations Center, HP Network Management Center, HP Network Management Center, and HP Change and Configuration Management Center.
HP at the HP Software Universe event will also roll out a pair of software upgrades. HP ServiceCenter Version 6.2 adds a new embedded service catalog, which is intended to streamline how users access IT services. New embedded knowledge management in the tool is designed to support self-help for incident management.
HP Configuration Management Software 5.0, a component of the Change and Configuration Lifecycle, delivers new levels of automation in discovering and enforcing configuration policies for devices.