Hewlett-Packard Co. is extending OpenViews reach with new tools that sources said drive the product into business process management and offer improved ways of analyzing network routing.
At this weeks HP Software Forum in Montreal, the Palo Alto, Calif., companys management software division will launch an OpenView Business Process Insight tool that, according to sources close to HP, will help customers better monitor business processes and their relationships to applications and IT resources.
The goal, the sources said, is to show customers the impact of infrastructure outages and performance degradation in business terms.
OpenView Business Process Insight pulls together and correlates data from operational and business applications to monitor each step in a business process continuously. It also shows which computing resource a given step depends on, according to sources familiar with the new tool.
The application is targeted more at CIOs and IT executives than at operations managers, said Mark Whatman, principal IT architect at Avaya Inc., in Maitland, Fla.
“You dont turn on a dime with this kind of radical rethinking of the way IT operates. A large percentage of IT is still looking at lights flashing and managing at the element level,” Whatman said.
“If it gives me something I can take to our business partners and finance people—and see if they want this type of intelligence—then well see if they want to get onboard.”
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Still, the new tool and the message come a step behind some competitors that have been touting ways of running IT as a service delivery organization, said OpenView user Paul Edmunds, senior systems programmer at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C.
“A lot of vendors have tried to play in this space, like Mercury Interactive [Corp.], Managed Objects [Solutions Inc.]—even IBM. Were seeing SLAs [service-level agreements] based on business processes,” Edmunds said.
“But the problem Im seeing from that standpoint is, Who pays for it? How do we charge back for it? Were not getting much demand from end users or the business units to manage to that level.”
HP will be targeting operational managers this week with another new tool, OpenView Route Analytics Management System.
The analytics tool brings HP up to the Layer 4 routing level for monitoring and managing routing protocols such as Cisco Systems Inc.s Open Shortest Path First, Ciscos Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol and Border Gateway Protocol.
Rather than polling routers or switches in the network, the tool can see actual packet routes, according to sources familiar with the tool.
At the tools debut this week, HP will tout that when combined with its OpenView Network Node Manager Advanced Edition, the route analytics offering can identify problems 80 percent faster than traditional network management, sources said.
“Any extra help you can get from a routing perspective will be a great benefit,” said Richard Glasberg, director of data communications for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts IT division, in Boston.
“This will be helpful for all those [customers] that have [reduced] the number of people looking at their networks today.”
HP officials declined to comment on any of the planned announcements at the event.