HP Addresses Application Readiness

The solution gives HP's application development partners, as well as VARs that provide application support, a set of tools that better prepare an application to run in a production environment, said Jon Atkins, solution marketing manager for application management at HP, Palo Alto, Calif.

Grooming an application using the OpenView Application Management portfolio improves application performance, lowers the cost of application maintenance and provides a better experience for end users accessing the application, Atkins said.

"What we want to do with OpenView Application Manager is complete the handshake between [application] development and production," he said. "By performance-tuning and optimizing the applications before they go into production, we have the equivalent of taking a car, putting it on a test track, testing the steering, testing the brakes and making sure it behaves predictably before it gets on the road."

HP's OpenView Application Management portfolio isn't intended to compete against broad software development tools such as those from Borland or Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net, according to Atkins. Instead, HP's solution is designed to provide development tools that plug into popular integrated development environments (IDEs), he said.

For example, the HP OpenView JMX Metric Builder tool plugs into BEA WebLogic Workshop to tune applications for Java Management Extensions (JMX), improving application manageability, Atkins said. An assortment of new or updated plug-ins for BEA Tuxedo, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Virtual Server, Microsoft Enterprise Server, SAP NetWeaver, Unix, Web Server and Remedy are also included. Third-party load scripts, too, can be run for multiple application testing, he said.

The concentration of BEA-related tools is significant, since about 34 percent of all new BEA sales are delivered on HP platforms, according to HP.

Using HP OpenView Select Identity application connectors--which come in the new portfolio as a result of HP's March 2004 acquisition of TrueLogica--many facets of application and user provisioning can be automated, improving security and compliance at the application level, Atkins said. Also in the portfolio, HP OpenView Internet Services version 6.0 sports an enhanced user interface that helps users "drill down to find problems with applications without having to parse through lines and lines of code," he said.

In addition, HP has changed its licensing to make it less expensive and less binding to take advantage of the OpenView Application Management portfolio. "We have created these short-term limited licensing agreements so a reseller can go into an account for the specific task of application performance-tuning. It's not like a perpetual test license; it's for a specific test," Atkins said. A set of HP OpenView Smart Plug-ins for Linux applications are also in the works, he added.

Keith Wilson, director of business development at Melillo Consulting, said the new OpenView Application Management portfolio "fits well with the engagements we are involved in" because the Somerset, N.J.-based systems integrator has an enterprise management practice and an application development practice.

"This latest release is pretty key," Wilson said. "There are a number of other products on the market that do a decent job with J2EE, but HP has a real lead with .Net."