SaHP Tuesday announced upgraded software and alternate licensing options that it says will help enterprise IT managers reduce costs and continue to deliver services during the economic downturn. 

At HP Software Universe in Vienna, Austria, HP unveiled upgraded products that the company says will help enterprise IT managers better prioritize projects and manage requirements for the business. For instance, HP integrated Quality Center 10.0 with Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), which will enable IT managers to see the number of events, incidents and defects that occur in a project to ensure business needs are met and projects are finished within deadline. Quality Center software manages and governs software quality assurance processes, automates software testing and facilitates defect management, according to HP.

"In these uncertain times, what we are seeing from customers is a need to invest smarter and wiser so they can come out of this down cycle ahead, instead of reacting and retracting with cost cutting. They want to ride this economic trend out and come out ahead ultimately," says Ramin Sayar, senior director of Business Service Management products at HP.

The enhanced integration will also make it possible for IT departments to identify low-value projects and reduce investment and labor in such projects. Added integration between Quality Center 10.0 and HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) 8.0 can also help customers centralize and standardize processes around best-practice frameworks, such as ITIL, HP says. This new version of UCMDB is integrated with 17 products across HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) portfolio, including Business Availability Center 8.0, Operations Manager i-Series, Network Node Manager i-Series Advanced and Service Manager.

"With limited resources to invest in new technologies, IT managers realize now is a good time to codify best practices," Sayar says. "Integrations with the UCMDB enable customers to see business services from start to finish, reduce risk and fix network problems using proven processes."

HP not only upgraded products with integrations, the company also introduced more ways to acquire its applications. For instance, the company made its BTO software suite available via software-as-a-service (SaaS) licensing. And in the wake of closing its acquisition of EDS, HP introduced EDS Designed for Run and EDS Testing and Quality Assurance Services, which provides enterprises with a clear path for modernizing applications and optimizing systems engineering processes, respectively. These prepackaged best practices will help customers get more from their investment sooner. And HP Financial Services is offering 0% financing, which Sayar says will offer more ways for customers to acquire HP software without budget worries.