* HP building common functions across its fastest selling products
When a company gets as big as HP, it can become difficult to discern the hidden gem from the hoopla in company marketing blasts. And it’s not entirely the company’s fault. For instance, HP has been clear about its commitment to software, and the company keeps reinforcing that commitment through acquisitions, such as the summer buy of data center automation vendor Opsware. But add the Opsware products to several other applications also acquired with Mercury Interactive and Peregrine Systems, among others and HP has its work cut out reconciling the technology it has today and communicating to customers how the products could meet their needs.
When a company gets as big as HP, it can become difficult to discern the hidden gem from the hoopla in company marketing blasts. And it’s not entirely the company’s fault. For instance, HP has been clear about its commitment to software, and the company keeps reinforcing that commitment through acquisitions, such as the summer buy of data center automation vendor Opsware. But add the Opsware products to several other applications also acquired with Mercury Interactive and Peregrine Systems, among others and HP has its work cut out reconciling the technology it has today and communicating to customers how the products could meet their needs.
Last week, HP hosted its Software Universe 2007 show in Barcelona and used the event as an opportunity to announce updates to its product suite. The company announced Service Manager 7.0, now available to customers as software-as-a-service. The company also upgraded its Decision Center software to Version 2.0, which can help IT managers calculate the potential change a difference in staff or capacity will have on application and business service levels.
While those product updates are all well and good, HP also announced a “key pillar” of its software business with HP Automated Operations 1.0. As far as the use of the word pillar, your guess is as good as mine in terms of what HP is thinking, but essentially this product portfolio takes existing products and services and brings them together for customers in an integrated suite that now includes the data center automation technology HP acquired with Opsware. So while as a jaded technology reporter I want to be able to point to a specific product or service as the exciting news, industry watchers tell me the meat of the HP’s news last week is about integration. And from what I hear, what HP has done and has plans to do is no small feat.
“The real guts of what HP is doing is about integration – which is not the sexiest of topics,” says Jasmine Noel, a principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates. According to Noel, HP is being smart about its product set and building common functions across its “fastest-selling products.” She says the company wants each product to include a service model, a hook into the universal configuration management database (CMDB), impact analysis and process orchestration. With these four distinct elements across its software applications, HP will be able to provide data center automation capabilities across large environments. HP has company in its efforts: competitors BMC, CA, Compuware, EMC, IBM and Symantec are also working to integrate these capabilities across their product suites.
“The real question is whether enterprises are going to get all four things from a single vendor,” Noel says. “To date the answer has been no, but enterprises are definitely whittling down the number of management vendors and picking a couple of strategic partners, so I suspect that competition for those few slots will be fierce.”
