HP OpenView to gain business process, protocol analysis

Business managers at Best Buy Canada are increasingly pushing the retailer's IT department for more information on how the IT infrastructure supports business processes. As a result, the IT group has been on the lookout for tools to help automate the gathering and sharing of such data.

"Non-IT people want to know if their service levels are going to be delivered," says Jason Kennedy, systems management analyst for the retailer in Vancouver, B.C.

HP this week plans to debut its OpenView Business Process Insight at the HP Software Forum in Montreal. The event is expected to attract 1,400 HP OpenView customers and partners.

HP says its new software can pull data from OpenView management software applications such as Operations and Service Navigator, and third-party business systems that track orders, payments and assorted statistics. The company says the software is meant to do more than track processes; it will show how system performance, such as when a server goes down, affects online ordering or other business processes.

Users of the server-based software initially would model the business service to be tracked. This involves detailing the servers, databases and other IT elements supporting the service and configuring the software to pull data from other management tools and business systems.

Industry analysts say this product, set to be available by mid-summer and starts at $190,000, could give HP the application-level and service-oriented tools it needs to expand beyond its network management roots.

"HP is taking a notable first step in bringing forth business relationships and business intelligence in IT management products," says Glenn O'Donnell, program director at Meta Group. Competitors such as BMC Software and IBM Tivoli also attempt to tie IT metrics to business performance.

Also to be announced this week is Version 7.5 of HP's cornerstone Network Node Manager (NNM) software. The software now can work with a new application called HP OpenView Route Analytics Management System. The new application can be used alongside NNM 7.5 to help customers analyze IP traffic and the SNMP events NNM collects, letting customers map physical and logical topologies of their networks.

The route analytics product is the result of an OEM agreement HP signed last year with Packet Design. HP will use Packet Design's technology on a ProLiant DL360 server installed on the network edge to passively monitor the IP protocol stack and determine how packets are being routed. The Route Analytics Management System is scheduled to ship next month. Pricing for the software begins at $25,000; the server will be sold separately.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.