HP eyes app lifecycle with OpenView

Hewlett-Packard last week strengthened its OpenView software portfolio with a raft of products and programs designed to bridge the gap between application development and users’ IT operations.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld

Company officials contend that application costs incurred after an application has been deployed can be significantly reduced by adding management capabilities earlier as well as throughout the lifecycle of an application.

“We are extending application management in OpenView to go beyond just looking at those applications in production — to looking throughout the application lifecycle,” said Scott Fulton, director of Hewlett-Packard’s application and business service management group.

With the new and enhanced products, HP is trying to automate the deployment of a company’s application infrastructure and provisioning products, which will free up most IT shops to spend more time innovating, company officials said.

“Our whole agenda with [HP’s] Adaptive Enterprise initiative is to shift a lot of the resources now spent on application production and maintenance over to more innovation pursuits, which is how a company can differentiate themselves from competitors,” Fulton said.

Some industry observers think HP’s approach is the right one to take in trying to minimize corporate users’ pain in implementing system management solutions.

“As application services become more complex, a full lifecycle approach becomes necessary to develop, optimize, deploy, and maintain applications that have to meet business needs that are constantly changing. IT organizations will have to develop comprehensive application management practices that eliminate barriers between development operations and infrastructure in the organization,” said Glenn O’Donnell, an analyst at Meta Group.

Some of the new and enhanced products in the OpenView portfolio include JMX Metric Builder, which now plugs into BEA’s Weblogic Workshop tool to instrument applications for Java Management Extensions; HP OpenView Select Identity application connectors, which can create or update user accounts and profiles; HP OpenView Radia Application Templates, for faster deployment of J2EE Web-based servers; and HP OpenView Internet Services 6.0, which features a new dashboard/graphical interface and Troubleshooting Insight Packs to help isolate problems faster.

HP also announced its OpenView Application Readiness Program, designed to help value-added resellers and systems integrators make use of OpenView management tools earlier in the application lifecycle so they can performance-tune applications in a preproduction environment, according to company officials.

The company hopes its new tools and programs also will help bridge the many different technologies that must work together in a typically complex heterogeneous corporate IT environment, allowing IT staffs to work more effectively at applying consistent management solutions.