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HP Introduces New Software to Automate Business Service Changes and Problem Resolution

Tuesday 24. June 2008 - HP today announced new Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software and Software-as-a-Service offerings to help IT organizations manage change and resolve problems across business services and applications, dramatically reducing the risk of potential business downtime.

The BTO software offerings enable customers to fully automate the entire change life cycle by bringing together the process and execution of changes such as application upgrades and infrastructure modifications. Depending on the size of a business, the number of technology changes occurring can range anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands per week.

A major risk in managing change comes from the failure to identify potential conflicts or change collisions during the change review process and during execution. This results in business service downtime. HP’s enhanced decision-support solution, HP Release Control, formerly HP Change Control Management, now further reduces this risk by providing real-time visibility of all change activity.

HP also introduced new integrations of business transaction management and problem isolation technologies to help customers quickly identify problems before they impact business services. By tracing issues from the end user to the infrastructure component, these solutions accelerate the problem isolation and resolution process.

These new Business Service Management offerings, combined with a new ITIL V3-based Configuration Management System (CMS) solution, provide customers a broader view of information about business services. This enables them to better manage the entire change life-cycle process to quickly identify and resolve business service issues.

These new offerings are being demonstrated live at HP Software Universe, the company’s annual customer and partner event focused on its software business.

“Managing the myriad of changes related to a major IT project would have been impossible using manual change processes and spreadsheets,” said Sheila Bridge, senior director, IT Global Compliance and Controls, Kellogg Company. “With the HP integrated solution, including HP Universal CMDB software, we not only successfully completed our major IT project on schedule, but we did so while maintaining perfect availability.”

In a recent Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey of 1,125 IT leaders worldwide, one out of four respondents said that 50 percent of their outages were caused by change. The EIU study also revealed that the majority of respondents agree that automation makes IT changes more predictable and consistent.

According to the analyst firm Gartner, “Ensuring high availability requires making controlled changes while preserving the integrity and service quality of the production environment. Enterprises can’t achieve this quality without effective IT change, configuration and release management processes.”(1)

New solutions to automate the change life cycle

HP Release Control software, with new integrations across the HP Business Service Automation portfolio, helps customers make better change approval decisions and provides real-time visibility into change activity enabling customers to identify change conflicts during execution. By linking change process management to release execution, the software helps minimize service disruptions and lower the risk of change.

HP Consulting and Integration services are available to help customers automate change and configuration, as well as service asset and release management. These services leverage the HP Service Management Reference Model, which is based on ITIL V3 and best practices from more than 15 years of customer engagements.

New solutions to automate problem isolation and resolution

With Business Availability Center 7.5, HP provides integrated business transaction management and advanced problem isolation to help IT better align with business priorities. By directly linking end-user experience to network path performance for faster resolution and more proactive management, customers can proactively manage and ensure consistent service quality.

Industry’s first ITIL V3-based Configuration Management System solution

Traditional approaches to providing a consolidated view of how IT delivers business services are insufficient. Static configuration management databases are unable to support the real-time needs of today’s complex technology environments.

Recognizing these limitations, ITIL V3, co-authored by HP, recommends a federated, or data-sharing, approach for delivering a complete configuration management system. The new HP Configuration Management System solution helps break down information barriers across organizational silos, providing the right information in the right context to the right person.

“With customers demanding 24/7 access to transactions and services, IT operations can no longer afford costly service disruptions caused by mismanaged change,” said Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager, Business Technology Optimization, Software, HP. “We deliver the complete solution that provides a consolidated view of change operations for impact assessment, improved decision support, change collaboration, automated execution and release.”

HP BTO Software as a Service offerings

HP Software-as-a-Service offers customers a means to quickly and cost-effectively leverage the benefits of HP BTO software. HP SaaS is a managed service delivered through the Internet that helps customers maximize the full value of HP software products via best practices and ongoing support. HP Business Availability Center 7.5, Release Control 4.0 and UCMDB 7.5 will be offered through HP SaaS in July.