Much like the Formula 1 racers at Canada’s Grand Prix here last weekend, Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to help customers reach the finish line of agile computing faster and with more skill than the competition.
The company kicked off activities at its annual HP Software Forum in Montreal and opened the show to 1,700 network executives that could learn more about how HP plans to address their management needs in the coming year. To start, the company this week will unveil products that the company says will help companies link IT management tool with business process systems and monitor routing traffic, respectively.
Nora Denzel, general manager of HP’s Adaptive Enterprise division and senior vice-president of software, discussed in a keynote presentation the company’s plans to move its customers to a more agile state, one in which IT can quickly change to support business demands. She detailed how HP’s OpenView management software will come to the forefront to help control a dynamically changing environment.
“Management in the past was a scheduled event, when processes and content were mostly static,” Denzel told show attendees. “Now IT needs to shift with the changes in the business and management will come front and center to help companies become more adaptive.”
Now two years old, HP’s Adaptive Enterprise details the company’s plan for delivering on-demand computing resources that shrink and grow according to business demands.
The strategy incorporates HP’s hardware, software and services, and integrates them to help customers quickly respond to changing resource needs and thus help their organizations run more efficiently. With the announcement, HP meets Computer Associates International Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., which have laid out plans for so-called utility computing.
HP’s vision would have customers participating in an agility assessment, either with HP or on their own, to determine where they are in terms of infrastructure, applications and business processes. Denzel said the complete vision involves simplification, standardization, modularity and integration of IT and business systems across the infrastructure, application and business processes layers. And the last element is key for IT managers in the coming years, she said.
“I don’t think IT, from chief executives down to network administrators, can not look up and across at the business processes and succeed in delivering IT services,” Denzel said.
