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Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday will describe its vision for adaptive management as part of its Adaptive Enterprise strategy and fill in pieces of the strategy with some 30 new and enhanced OpenView management offerings.
But despite the breadth of new OpenView offerings and the improved clarity around its adaptive management message, HP still hasnt connected the dots between its strategy and where its new and existing products fit in, observers say.
“They need to make it clear whats shipping today and what portions remain to be filled in,” said Jasmine Noel, principal at JNoel Associates in Boston. “Hopefully next week theyll make that very clear and be able to demonstrate Heres what were doing today and let people connect those dots so they can see how the products provide the foundation for the long-term vision.”
The strategy is built on a flexible reference architecture, dubbed Darwin, that surrounds business process, application and infrastructure layers with management, control, measurement and assessment functions. The goal is to move the focus of management from maintaining stabile IT environments to aligning IT with the business and then into a real-time-change-with-business-requirements model, according to sources.
“They are talking about three stages of adoption for adaptive computing. They say they have customers and products at each stage. The highest level is fully automated adaptive computing,” one source said.
To improve stability, HP will outline new functionality in its flagship OpenView Network Node Manager that integrates fault, performance and embedded diagnostic functions, according to sources. The new release also includes a new graphical interface; new options for managing frame relay, Multiprotocol Label Switching and voice over IP (VOIP); enhanced reporting; and Linux support.
The embedded intelligence is a key competitive feature, believes Noel. “What Node Manager really needs is a boost in root cause analysis capabilities. They need something to go up against Smarts, ProactiveNet and other service-level management vendors.”
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HP and partners, working with a new unified developer toolkit, will also introduce a number of new Smart Plug-Ins for OpenView, including a Smart Plug-In for integrating wireless management with Network Node Manager from Wavelink.
The new VOIP option provides discovery and layout of IP telephony-specific components, and fault and performance management for VOIP, and it integrates with Ciscos Call Center to streamline administration of telephony services.
To better align IT with the business, HP will describe a common graphical interface for its OpenView Service Desk and OpenView Service Navigator that provides bus-oriented service views. HP is also bolstering the integration and correlation capabilities between those offerings to speed problem resolution in a new OpenView Service Navigator Value Pack, sources said.
In addition, HP will outline a new Web Services Management strategy to advance business agility goals. At the heart of the strategy is a new Web Services Management Engine that manages the Web services stack of hardware, operating systems, .Net or J2EE Web services, and the application. The engine works with and gathers data from OpenView Service Desk, OpenView Operations and OpenView Transaction Analyzer as well as other data sources. It is aimed at managing Web services transaction instrumentation, service-level objective monitoring and authentication.
Despite the many advances, key elements required for HP to reach its vision are still missing, believes Debra Curtis, research director at Gartner Inc. in Amherst, N.H. HP has not yet consolidated reporting between multiple products, including the HP Performance View Insight product acquired nearly two years ago with the Trinagy acquisition.
“You have to have the data store where you are keeping track of historical performance and service-level metrics over time to accurately make the real-time adjustments. Its a foundation element for any kind of service management,” she said.
Additional reporting by Carmen Nobel.