HP Aims To Link IT Platforms And Business ProcessesHP Aims To Link IT Platforms And Business Processes

Hewlett-Packard will unveil several new offerings at its Software Forum in Montreal on Tuesday designed to broaden its Adaptive Enterprise effort and provide greater linkage between business processes and IT platforms.

"Business and IT should be synchronized to capitalize on ongoing change," says Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager at HP's management software organization. "We want to take more steps towards providing a very comprehensive way of realizing the core value proposition that [process] management provides in dynamically linking business and IT, Management software provides that link--we're taking a business process and understanding its technical enablement for IT and its overall business impact."

HP will introduce OpenView Business Process Insight, which will let users take a specific process, such as order to shipment or accepting products along a supply chain, and provide analysis of how the IT environment can provide enablement for each step of that process, Emmett says.

For example, he says, HP customer Swisscom, a mobile services operator, is using the technology to improve customer activation. Swisscom is able to model its activation process, including taking an order, card activation, credit checks, and inventory pull.

After looking at results of the process, Swisscom was able to determine that each piece of the process worked well, with the exception of the credit check. Nearly a quarter of the time, the credit-check analysis was unavailable, meaning that the process had to be performed manually, which resulted in increasing provision time. Swisscom was able to take the newly mined information and redirect resources to improving the credit-check process, rather than using its resources in other areas of the process that were running smoothly, Emmett says.

"There are vendors that can provide correlation between a business process and IT components, and there are vendors who can complete business activity monitoring," he says. "We can now bring both perspectives together, and see not only how IT impacts the business process, but how the business process impacts the business at large."

HP will add a new level to its service-management offering, by working with research firm IDC to perform productivity, availability, and return-on-investment studies around specific implementations of IT service management using OpenView technologies.

HP will introduce the OpenView Route Analytics Management System, designed to help network and data-center managers reduce the time spent identifying network problems. The software lets the manager discern between normal events on the network; undesirable, but not disabling changes in network traffic; and problems that could lead to service disruptions.

Traditional network administration tools ping devices for availability and for information routes. The new HP system looks at route headers embedded in each network packet, analyzes them, and makes distinctions about changes happening within the network, Emmett says.

HP also plans to unveil expansion of its partnership program with its Enterprise Management Services effort. It will include release of a set of integration technologies to improve the operation between HP products and services and those of other partner providers, he says.

In addition, HP is creating a new level called the Elite Partnership, in which HP and those partners will move beyond product integration to creating new customer specific joint business activities, Emmett says. "We expect this to be extremely well received by existing partners, but also a very attractive recruitment tool for new partners," he says.

The new products and services are scheduled to begin rolling out in July, and all will be available within 90 days.