HPE OneView ITAM Software: Product Overview and Insight

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Published June 4, 2018

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eWEEK is starting a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.

Today: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise OneView Asset Manager (IT Asset Management software)

Company description: HPE is a descendent of the iconic Hewlett-Packard Co. founded in 1939 and respected as one of the longest-running and most successful IT companies in history.

The company maintains its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and is publicly traded as HPE on the New York Stock Exchange. It has a market cap of $22.2 billion, reported revenue of $31 billion in 2017 and employs about 66,000 full-time employees.

HP Inc. split into two corporate entities in November 2015. The other company, HP Inc., also is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

HPE has long been a high-level provider of Software Asset Management and Software License Optimization solutions, enabling enterprises to gain visibility and control of IT assets, reduce ongoing software costs and maintain continuous license compliance. These capabilities are delivered as a comprehensive suite of enterprise software asset management and license compliance solutions that optimize the management of software assets throughout the software lifecycle.

International Operations: HPE has a global presence with offices in 57 countries.

Key Markets: HPE’s key markets are the Americas and EMEA.

Product descriptions: HPE offers ITAM products in several categories: infrastructure automation, asset recovery, end-of-life asset recovery, software license optimization, software monetization and software vulnerability management. The company’s solutions include:

HPE OneView is an infrastructure automation engine to simplify operations, increasing the speed of IT delivery for new applications and services. Through software defined intelligence, HPE OneView brings a new level of automation to infrastructure management by taking a template-driven approach to provisioning, updating and integrating compute, storage, and networking infrastructure. Designed with a modern, standard-based API and supported by a large and growing partner ecosystem, HPE OneView also makes it easy to integrate powerful infrastructure automation into existing IT tools and processes.

HPE Asset Recovery services: HPE Financial Services is a proactive asset recovery strategy can help you optimize and manage the physical, financial and contractual aspects of your technology throughout the IT lifecycle.

Asset Recovery Services (ARS) are more than just IT equipment removal. A programmatic ARS strategy can help you optimize and manage your IT assets throughout the entire lifecycle by improving:

Governance of business processes: Aligns your internal best practices with data security and environmental standards forsafe, responsible IT removal and recycling;

Global scope and capabilities: Consistent support and processes for your business around the world;

Brand credibility: A trusted ARS partner with a vested interest in maintaining your high standards and brand name;

Revenue through monetizing existing owned assets: Remarkets your unneeded equipment for money back; our experts can help you maximize resale value Virtual Warehouse services by centralizing, cataloguing, testing, and warehousing decommissioned IT assets at our site versus yours, we provide the ability to store, update, and redeploy unused or legacy assets to support future projects.

In its Technology Renewal Centers, HPE provides:

Reverse logistics, warehousing, and customer inventory portal: Getting assets to and from your site on a global scale, keeping them in our secure warehouse, and giving you access at any time through a dedicated customer portal;

Inspection, test, disassembly, and cataloging: HPE tracks everything it receives from you with serialized asset tagging. HPE can also break down the equipment, test it and create stocking criteria based on your needs;

Custom product redeployment: Equipment can be redeployed as parts, or as customized complete systems. Custom configurations include latest versions of patches and firmware, and custom software and imaging. And all can be sent to the location of your choice.

Data Center Consolidation/Migration: Using HPE’s engineering and configuration capabilities, the data center consolidation/ migration service gives HPE the ability to deliver pre-configured, customized systems for your project.

Asset Recovery Services for trade-in, and secure logistics ensure a seamless end-to-end transition.

Other services include:

planning and configuration;

deployment and activation to install the replicated systems in the new location and transfer the data;

trade-in of the old infrastructure to help pay for the new equipment;

proof of concept enablement; and

having a flexible pool of IT technology assets that can be deployed and redeployed for the purpose of demonstrating a design concept technology is critical for OEMs and application vendors. HPE Proof of Concept enablement services enable partners to provide their customers with POC solutions, while taking the complexities of managing POC’s off their plate.
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End-of-life Asset Recovery Path: HPE offers a proactive IT asset recovery strategy that goes beyond secure IT removal. Its services helps users optimize IT assets throughout the entire lifecycle so they can implement sustainable business practices and take advantage of new technologies.

Key top-line business benefits of all HPE products:

General digital transformation;
Windows desktop and server migrations;
application virtualization;
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
mobile application management (MAM)
remediation of application vulnerabilities

Insight and Analysis:

HPE’s OneView ITAM software is ideal for measuring vendor performance and optimizing licensing costs. Business values include optimization of IT asset allocation, integrated vendor metric measurement tools and total cost of ownership and ROI accounting. The software also can help enterprises remarket their unneeded equipment for money back; HPE’s services experts can help customers maximize resale value. HPE uses is longtime expertise to help enterprises enhance their brand reputations and ensure that IT is properly handled during end-of-life with a trusted partner.

HPE is designed expressly for large enterprise deployments; it can be used to discover, verify, validate and document more than 100,000 products.

Pro: HPE sends advisories out for all assessment tools and the product tests and repackages patches for the most common desktop applications. It also has customizable reports and dashboards for analytics.

Pro: Gartner Peer Insights carries the following description for HPE’s ITAM software package: Overall comment: As part of entire HP Open view (BTO) suite, Asset manager is quite good and very helpful for day-to-day asset analysis, refresh cycle, license management and end-to-end integration for asset life cycle management. HP Asset Manager is being used to track licenses on applications. It is mainly used by the software asset management team to assign billings and track how many licenses we own.

Pro: Open View provides a single place to track, document and analyze all asset management queries. The new layout is very user-friendly; it gives users quite a few options to customize a dashboard. HP has included great help topics with their new updates. With the keyword search, all the information is at your fingertips.

HP asset manager will reduce your day-to-day asset life cycle management work by at least 15-20 percent. Users need to consider end-to-end integration to achieve asset lifecycle management comprehensively. Your ERP needs to be integrated with HP Asset Manager so as to track down procurement until the asset is retired.

Con: HP may want to invest into single sign-on where users don’t need to put in user IDs and password constantly.

List of current customers:

HPE One View customers include Telecom Italia, Black & Decker, Constellation Energy, UniCredit Deployment.

Feature Set:

Handles license consumption calculations for virtual applications, virtual desktops (VDI), virtual machines (VM), hard partitions and sub-capacity licensing;
Monitors software product use rights and application usage for all license models and all vendors;
Tracks usage in a product-specific way that aligns with how the software usage is monetized.

Implementation:

Deployment: On-premises installation.

Agents: Agents are used to determine the patch status of installed programs, and agentless assessment is also available. Agents can be deployed as packages for installation, or distributed as files through third-party systems such as SCCM and executed via command line.