Betting on Adaptive Enterprise

The $73 billion computing giant Hewlett Packard (HP) has moved into high-end
utility computing with its Adaptive Enterprise strategy. As part of this
strategy initiative, HP has introduced more than 40 new management services and
software products, which according to the company, would help customers
integrate heterogeneous technologies, cut IT operation costs by up to 30% and
increasingly automate responsiveness to real-time business demands.

It has invested $2.5 billion this year on Adaptive Enterprise-related
R&D, half of which has been on developing management software. This
incidentally accounts for nearly 60% of HP’s entire R&D budget. The
initiative is primarily aimed at helping companies and CIOs get the IT
infrastructure they need at a pay-as-you-go price point. IBM, Sun Microsystems,
Computer Associates (CA) and Veritas have all pledged allegiance to similar
strategies, which analysts believe could usher in a new era of competitive
computing.

Adaptive management breaks the cycle of endless maintenance costs, so CIOs can once again invest in innovation

Strategy Intricacies

Claims David Gee, HP adaptive management marketing VP, "Adaptive
management breaks the cycle of endless maintenance costs, so CIOs can once again
invest in innovation."

According to the company, its approach to adaptive management would help
integrate people, process and technology to run IT as a business and automate
the dynamic link between business and IT. It is currently delivering its IT
Service Management (ITSM) best practices with new certification programs and
pre-configured process templates to help align their IT strategies with business
objectives.

The HP initiative include business agility metrics, new virtualization
software for automated resource utilization and new self-healing software for HP
OpenView also know as autonomic computing. In addition, much of HP’s on-demand
technology relies on its Utility Data Center (UDC) initiative. The HP UDC makes
it possible to virtualize data center resources such as servers, networking,
storage and applications and reallocate them according to need. Lastly, the
Adaptive Enterprise strategy also involves an alliance with SAP to help large
enterprises lower the total cost of IT operations and an acquisition of Persist
Technologies to deliver information lifecycle management (ILM) software that
actively manages information from creation to deletion.

HP has already packaged ten Adaptive Enterprise solutions, which include
hardware, software, services and partnerships. These would help address
enterprise integration, IT consolidation, management, virtualization, business
continuity and security. The other four let customers deal with on demand
solutions, managed services, integrated support and financing.

HP’s new virtualization offerings include the Consolidated Client
Infrastructure solution that gives customers the ability to virtualize their
corporate desktop systems and realize significant cost savings. The average cost
saving can be up to $1,200 per user per year, and up to 50% total savings over a
four-year lifecycle. HP has also optimized its Virtual Server Environment
solution for BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and Oracle9i Database enabling companies to
dynamically grow and shrink server resources to meet service-level objectives.

Opening OpenView

HP has also extended its OpenView management software into the
business-process layer by integrating technology acquired with Talking Blocks
into a new HP OpenView Management Integration platform. It combines the work HP
undertook around Web Services Description Language and SOAP-based Web services
management and other Web services applications built using XML over HTTP, Java
and even CORBA.

Says Gee, "This allows customers to get started by building a foundation
starting in one area, gain expertise in that area and put in building
blocks." The specific problems the platform will solve initially are issues
such as who can access a new Web service, how to authenticate and authorize
users, determine what quality of service those users receive, and track that
service across multiple users as well as enforce it.

HP also updated its OpenView Select Access identity management software in a
new version release. The software, acquired earlier this year from Baltimore
Technologies, has been enhanced to provide forms-based identity management to
make it easier for the user to understand what they have access to and what they
are denied access to. In addition, the software comes with the ability to make
authorization decisions on inbound SOAP transaction as well as identify and
authorize workflow.

On the hardware front and outside of the OpenView umbrella, HP also merged
the capabilities of three hardware management tools into a single offering that
can manage HP UX, Linux and Windows boxes. The new Systems Insight Manager
combines the functions of HP’s existing Service Control Manager for HP-UX,
TopTools and HP InSight Manager 7 for Proliant servers. It can be extended with
plug-ins to manage other hardware elements and is integrated with both OpenView
Network Node Manager and OpenView Operations.

Informs Tony Parkinson, director, industry standard servers, HP, "It can
be launched from the consoles of those tools and users can drill down from those
consoles into individual servers to reboot them or take other corrective
actions."

SAP & ILM–The Future

Outside the new offerings, HP also outlined a new memorandum of
understanding with SAP to work together on an IT Services Management project to
link business processes with IT infrastructure. By combining the necessary
toolsets and methodologies from the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy and SAP’s
adaptive business service strategy, HP and SAP will work to allow more effective
management of customers’ entire heterogeneous IT environments-spanning
networks, systems, middleware, databases and enterprise software-to support the
needs of adaptive business.

"As a large enterprise, efficiently managing our complex IT environment
is often difficult, time consuming and costly endeavor," says Chew See Kee,
vice president, SAP Active Global Support–Asia Pacific. "The synergy of
SAP’s business application and process management functionalities with HP’s
management software and architecture as well as its integration services is thus
very appealing. It would make adaptive management across the entire stack a
reality, helping us increase flexibility and agility as well as decrease
complexity and costs."

The Persist Technologies acquisition is expected to improve HP’s ability to
deliver complete ILM solutions. With Persist’s active archiving software, HP
expects to deliver enhanced archiving solutions to assist customers in complying
with emerging and stringent data retention regulations and extract business
value from large amounts of reference information. With several vendors offering
on demand solutions, HP hopes its new launch will attract more companies to the
play the HP game.

RAJNEESH DE (The author was hosted by
HP in Singapore)