HP says: Manage IT as a service

By Denise Dubie, NetworkWorld.com, 07/14/06

HP's OpenView management software is popular among network managers, but company executives have been working to evolve its software to address more than restoring downed devices and watching network traffic.

According to Russ Daniels, vice president and CTO, of HP's Software and Adaptive Enterprise in its Technology Solutions Group, network executives today need to adapt their departments in service providers and couple the bottom-up management skills of yesterday with top-down approaches to optimizing application performance.

Daniels recently discussed the topic with me during a one-on-one interview, and explained how vendors such as HP can help move network managers from constant firefighting mode into service assurance and delivery managers. The company has been for the past few years incorporating more business process intelligence into its software (OpenView Business Process Insight) and bringing the business and IT managers' perspective to monitoring and reporting tools (OpenView Dashboard).

More recently HP added specific vertical industry know-how to its Business Process Insight and added capacity planning for both IT staff and resources to its OpenView Decision Center software. Yet at the same time, HP keeps up to date with the latest trends in the network management trenches. For example, the company recently increased its partnership with Voyence to provide customers with network change and configuration management capabilities.

Daniels says the company, like its customers, has to balance the needs of the business with its technology initiatives.

"Customers that are most successful find a balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches to managing IT based on business needs. The concept that you can start from the bottom and build up and eventually get to the right level of business abstraction, in our experience doesn't actually work. IT needs to adopt [a] top-down view that is complementary to the bottom-up efforts. The focus needs to change toward delivering unified services across the network, servers and storage, rather than exhausting operational efforts from the bottom up," Daniels says.

To read the full interview, click here.

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