HP, IBM Duel on Management Software

Management software is a multi-billion-dollar market that shows no signs of
slowing down.

HP and IBM made sure of that by trotting out new software products to help
customers get a better grip on the flow of their data.

At HP’s Software Universe conference in Nice, France today, HP unleashed new
IT service management software in its ongoing fight to win market share from
IBM, CA and BMC Software in this space.

The OpenView Dashboard 1.0 pulls information from multiple data sources to
help customers monitor their enterprise applications and e-mail in
real-time.

Customers can build detailed dashboard views of business services through a
point-and-click interface that will inform them of system events,
performance, and anti-virus security attacks.

Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager at HP’s management software, said that
while dashboards are nothing new in management software, HP believes its
approach saves more time. While traditional dashboards have created a single
snapshot or view, Emmett said OpenView Dashboard allows customers to create
multiple views in less than an hour.

Starting at $60,000, OpenView Dashboard 1.0 will be ready in the first
quarter of 2006.

OpenView Service Desk 5.0 is a configuration management database that boasts
out-of-the-box integrations for closed-loop operations and reduced costs,
including a new reporting tool and a “Webstart” tool for speedy deployment.

Service Desk 5.0 links with OpenView Dashboard to help customers get an
automated response to business information related to incidents and changes
on a network. It also works with OpenView Configuration Management and
OpenView Service Desk Process Insight.

Available now, Service Desk 5.0 pricing varies according to service level
agreements.

Available in Q1 2006, OpenView Business Process Insight 2.0 monitors and
reports on business processes. Version 2.0 includes pre-defined business
metrics and automatic process health dashboards.

HP’s upgrade come as part of CEO Mark Hurd’s directive to grow the OpenView
line through internal development and acquisition.

‘
While the latest OpenView product are homegrown, HP has made several
management-oriented purchases of late, including AppIQ,
Peregrine Systems, and a bid last
week for Trustgenix.

Not to be outdone, IBM also updated its Tivoli management software
portfolio, adding new autonomic software products that can pinpoint and fix
problems before they stifle a Web-based business.

Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 allows companies to manage online
applications, such as e-mail or bill paying systems, by correcting IT
service problems that can gum up a company’s servers, operating systems and
databases before it impacts customers.

Tivoli
Composite Application Manager accelerates access to information on the
Internet by predicting and fixing bottlenecks that crop up as dozens of
different systems connect under a service oriented architecture (SOA)
.

Tivoli System
Automation for Multiplatforms gauges the status of applications running
on multiple platforms and operating systems and uses policies to bring them
back online if the system fails.