Realizing that providing technical answers is not always enough to smooth the bumps out of the e-business road, Hewlett-Packard is seeking to make its OpenView network management platform capable of solving customers' specific business problems by making those bumps easy to identify and manage.
Officials of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard will announce a number of enhancements designed to give greater functionality and control of its HP OpenView VantagePoint e-services product suite during this week's OpenView 2000 Conference in Orlando, Fla.
"This is going to be a unification where end-to-end management comes together," said Stamford, Conn.-based analyst and Meta Group Vice President Herb VanHook of VantagePoint's attempt to tie in operational management and service management of an electronic enterprise. "It's easier for customers to give them a road map for that," he said.
VanHook noted escalating movement within the network management industry toward simplifying users' experience, such as last month's release of Austin, Texas-based BMC Software's beefed-up Patrol 2000 application management system.
But VanHook said that customers looking for true out-of-the-box correlation and good management agents within a secure environment have yet to be satisfied.
Through integration with the technology of San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote Systems, HP OpenView VantagePoint offers a clearer forecast of e-transaction management to pinpoint the exact source of Internet delays, said Magdy Assem, solution planning manager for HP OpenView Electronic Enterprise.
The new suite will allow users to examine the measurement of system performance vs. the impact of service-level management on an infrastructure. By making a clear connection between the business payoff and services offered, customers should have a much better idea of whether or not service-level management is something they want to incorporate, said Rich Ptak, vice president of systems and applications management at Hurwitz Group, based in Framingham, Mass.
"Embedding of best practices-that's becoming more and more prevalent," Ptak said, "having the ability not only to indicate a problem but present the process for problem resolution and best practices. Before, there was no easy way for the consumer."
Assem said the new suite enhancements should be available in July. HP OpenView VantagePoint starts at $20,000.
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