Net/Systems Management /
The message from OpenView 2000 was clear and ambitious - Hewlett-Packard is seeking to realign the more than 40 applications of OpenView into a single coherent brand family of products.
Such brand consolidation would be ambitious for any major player in the management software and services marketplace, but it is particularly noteworthy for HP - given its breadth of products and services, and its heritage of complex product lists.
In spite of the challenges, this initiative will help HP and its customers by offering better, more memorable products that are more easily deployed for clearer benefits at less cost - especially in terms of time, resources and training.
OpenView has a unique opportunity before it, because its management product line spans with reasonable equity the two camps that are increasingly attacking similar problems from historically two very different perspectives. These are the network-centric and the system-centric camps. Just as network management vendors are increasingly focused on application performance and delivery, system-centric vendors are venturing toward a more network-centric, distributed infrastructure. But both of the visions are biased and incomplete, and the handshake between network and systems management vendors has been more of a miss than a firm grasp. Add to this the interplay between software and services (HP also is a significant provider of outsourcing services), as well as interdependencies between business/market intelligence with infrastructure performance, and you get a lot of the muddle in today's management marketplace.
Can HP pull off the seemingly impossible and heal these quasi-religious schisms through development and marketing? Certainly, it's possible, but to do so OpenView will have to execute successfully in product development while looking beyond existing market categories to anticipate future ones.
For now, the news from OpenView 2000 was encouraging. Already, HP has established better consistency across software and hardware platforms, and has increasingly used Web-based Enterprise Management standards for interoperability across management software.
Perhaps more importantly, OpenView has already created two major product clusters that will be examined in subsequent newsletters: VantagePoint and OpenView Express. VantagePoint provides a business-centric, automated approach to infrastructure control and performance management that's directed at the e-business economy. OpenView Express is targeted at midtier enterprises, and offers network, systems, application and storage management for reasonable prices with quick deployment. The strong recognition of requirements for automated, fast deployment with high levels of business intelligence was reassuring. If you can't deploy quickly, you can't stay current, and if you can't stay current, you can't manage the Internet.
These product families, however, remain substantially positive first steps rather than final answers. For one, midtier enterprises often require as much or more e-business-oriented management as larger enterprises and service providers. For another, there remain plenty of areas where it's not clear where products will fit. For example, one of the potentially more compelling tools is PolicyXpert, which will, in the future, seek to unite quality of service with performance management for better context and self-regulation. Another issue is the need for a stronger connection to billing and accounting applications. And e-speak agents, which dynamically enable dialog across related e-business services, were intriguingly unanchored within the broader product scheme.
The ultimate appeal of management software in the future is that it will enable the creation of new business services and help to consolidate business loyalty among partners and customers. Technical precision is essential, but it can no longer be a product definer. HP OpenView's progress towards this value proposition will be worth watching, and as products shape up they should be well worth considering. But this also means raising the bar on expectations for performance and business value when evaluating OpenView solutions.
Redefining OpenView
 
|
|||
 | |||
|
Sign up to receive this and other networking newsletters in your inbox.
