News

HP Unveils Automated Operations Suite

• By Kurt Mackie
• November 26, 2007

This latest integration effort has produced a suite of solutions called "Automated Operations 1.0." It's focused on the operations side of BTO.

Eric Vishria, vice president of products at HP Software, explained that HP Software's BTO approach, which aims to help management align IT with business goals, has three components:

• IT strategy
• Application development (including HP's Mercury, Quality Center and Performance Center products) and
• IT operations (Automated Operations 1.0)

Vishria said that HP Software has focused over the last year on giving companies "an entirely new way to manage their IT operations," resulting in Automated Operations 1.0.

"We've taken all of the different domain areas within IT operations and we've tied them together tightly to enable customers to manage their entire operations in an automated way," he explained

Automated Operations 1.0 is a suite of solutions encompasses three key areas. One is "business service management," which is associated with monitoring and managing the health of services, looking at things like the end-user experience and service level agreements (SLAs). Another is "business service automation," with the goal of automating all of the tasks associated with managing the underlying infrastructure associated with business services. The third concern is "IT Service Management (ITSM)," which Vishria defined as a way to coordinate people and the process of managing IT.

In the BTO world, a "service" is defined as "the thing that IT is delivering to business," Vishria said. The term doesn't necessarily imply a service-oriented architecture.

The Automated Operations 1.0 suite takes the typical fragmented IT management structure and unifies the elements, according to Vishria.

"Now we've actually tied everything together with a common understanding of what that service is," he said. "So, whether your are trying to ensure compliance with SLAs, deal with the processes associated with incidents, problems and change, or actually updating the underlying infrastructure -- all of the tools are working off a common understanding of that service."

Automated Operations 1.0 unifies the processes too, he added.

"You have a common process that works its way through all of these different products and you don't have to deal with all of the handoffs," Vishria explained. "And that's our umbrella announcement with Automated Operations 1.0."

HP Software's BTO solutions are typically targeted toward a company's vice president of operations, Vishria explained. The solutions deal with a company's entire IT lifecycle.

With this latest announcement, HP Software has also enhanced its ITSM assets from HP OpenView, Peregrine, Mercury and Opsware.

HP Software announced earlier this month that it had closed its acquisition of Mercury Interactive Corp., which was company's biggest software acquisition to date and a catalyst for HP Software's BTO strategy. Mercury brought application management and IT governance technologies to HP Software's BTO product line.

More information on HP Software's BTO solutions is available here.