HP bolsters OpenView IT management range

Better tools for monitoring and modelling IT systems are in the pipeline

HP unveiled a major update to its OpenView IT management software portfolio at its Software Forum in Miami Beach yesterday (20 June), featuring three new or updated toolsets due later this year to better monitor and manage the IT environment and the activities of the IT department.

HP’s new OpenView DecisionCenter toolset, due in September, will let CIOs model changes in IT service-level agreements to see how they will affect resource and staffing requirements.

Due at the same time is version 5.0 of OpenView AssetCenter – the asset management suite acquired through the purchase of Peregrine Software last year. HP said the updated version offers tighter integration with the rest of the OpenView portfolio and has a new web-based interface that will allow non-IT staff to access asset-management tools.

Thsee two suites will be followed before the end of the year by OpenView Application Insight - a new application management tool that will allow IT administrators to monitor the performance of applications and related infrastructure.

Todd DeLaughter, vice-president and general manager for HP OpenView, said in a statement that the new tools would help IT managers better analyse how service availability and performance affects the business.

In separate news, IT management specialist Numara Software published the results this week of a global survey of 2,630 IT professionals. It found just 11 percent of firms followed formal IT support best practices such as Itil.

The report says smaller firms are particularly likely to ignore best practices - under four percent of organisations with less than 200 employees followed formal guidelines.

Dale Vile of analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, which carried out the survey for Numara, said that while Itil and similar best practice guidelines are valuable for large firms they tend to be too proscriptive for smaller companies. "Itil grew out of the public sector and was designed to handle large complex environments, but as a result it is a bit too process-centric for smaller IT departments that work more flexibly," he explained.

Vile argued there is a need for a version of Itil for smaller companies, but said that in the meantime the emergence of IT management software suites that automate best-practice workflows is making it easier for firms to implement aspects of Itil.

Brett Wing of Numara Software said the report suggests that best-practice models such as Itil have been over-hyped. "Every business is unique and firms have realised they need to develop their own best practices," he said. "If there are guidelines out there that suit your business then be pragmatic and use them, but you need to exercise some caution about following them too closely."