* HP's Network Node Manager i 8.0
HP this week renewed the faith of thousands of its management software loyalists by overhauling what has long been thought to be the cornerstone of the company’s software business: Network Node Manager.
HP’s NNM i 8.0, or Network Node Manager i 8.0, promises to give new capabilities to existing customers who decide to upgrade — which is free for those with valid support licenses. HP says with the upgraded NNM customers can automatically view on their console only network problems that require operator action and can more quickly determine the root cause of a network problem. The software includes topology maps linked with the causes of issues and runs continuous discovery processes to keep the maps up-to-date. Those are just a few new capabilities as the list of features goes on and on, and that is good news to HP customers who have been waiting for close to 4 years for a major upgrade to NNM. Still some are skeptical.
“If I seem confused it is because I am. HP has been very tight with details of NNM i 8.0 even to its beta testers,” says Mike Peckar, principal consultant at Fognet Consulting and a member of HP’s user group. “Overall, I’m looking forward to the new version addressing some serious scalability and distribution issues that have plagued the product for years, and I have no doubts that there are major changes to look and feel of NNM in this version.”
NNM i 8.0 is part of a larger product upgrade the company announced this week. The management application is part of HP Network Management Center 8.0, which HP says helps customers increase service levels to business users, align IT with business objectives and decrease IT cost structures. The solution uses automation capabilities to fix network problems and follows the best practices laid out in ITIL to do so.
With the network management software installed in more than 10,000 customer environments worldwide, keeping the product up-to-date seems like it would be an obvious priority for HP. But considering the vendors heavy acquisition schedule (Peregrine Systems, Mercury Interactive and Opsware, just to name few) and bigger pushes toward IT service management and data center automation, HP might have let its cornerstone technology slide a bit. And the vendor in 2006 was cited by research firm IDC as having the largest share — more than 28% — of the market for distributed performance and availability management software and HP reported $757 million in revenue for those products in the same year.
“There hasn’t been a lot of development going on and with all the acquisitions of late, NNM had gotten a bit lost in the shuffle at HP,” says Stephen Elliot, a research manager covering enterprise system management at IDC. “Now with things changing in the broader management domain and HP doing business service management, the network is getting attention again. This release should be a real coming out party for the installed base.”
