HP To Unleash OpenView Product Blitz

While customers aren't yet asking for Adaptive Enterprise by name, it is the direction they want to move in, said Bob Flaherty, vice president of service strategy and business development at InteQ, a consulting firm and MSP in Bedford, Mass.

"The only way you can really [meet increasing performance and reliability requirements] is with a highly automated monitoring system that gets you as close to that root cause as possible and hopefully automates fixes as well," Flaherty said.

Among the new products to be announced at the show, to be held in Chicago, is Network Node Manager (NNM) 7.0, the latest upgrade of HP's network management software, which adds improved root cause analysis capabilities, said Bill Emmett, solutions marketing manager at HP, Palo Alto, Calif.

With the upgrade, HP is also splitting the product line into two versions: Starter and Advanced. Starter provides network management capabilities for mid-size businesses while Advanced adds integrated management of Layer 2 switched networks and diagnostics, more complex capabilities available previously as separate offerings, Emmett said.

With two NNM options, solution providers can better tailor network management solutions to fit customer needs and reach smaller customers with OpenView than previously possible, said Gary Hazard, vice president of Atrion, a solution provider in Hillsborough, NJ.

"We can drive that target down into the SMB space, and then next year we can build onto it with more products," Hazard said.

HP also plans to debut Network Services Management add-ons to NNM for managing frame relay networks and IP telephony implementations, Emmett said.

"OpenView can provide reporting and monitoring to make sure that latency, jitter and packet loss are well within the boundaries acceptable for IP telephony," he said.

Other new OpenView products include Operations for Windows 7.2, HP's systems and applications management tool, which adds support for Windows Server 2003, and Business Impact Analysis a new tool that enables customers to model business process workflow and the infrastructure that supports it.

"If the infrastructure goes down, you can identify what piece of the process is broken," Emmett said.

To help manage Web services, HP plans to introduce Transaction Analyzer 2.0, which adds increased support for Web services infrastructure, and Internet Services 5.0, a tool to create synthetic testing for Web services response times.

Pricing for the new products, scheduled for general availability within the next 90 days, was not finalized by press time. Emmett said pricing for NNM Starter is expected to start at $4,000 to $5,000, while pricing for Advanced will likely start between $8,000 to $10,000.

Several HP technology partners also plan to debut new products and tighter relationships with HP at the conference.

Management software vendor Altiris, Lindon, Utah, said HP has certified its Connector for HP OpenView, which provides OpenView NNM, Operations and Service Desk customers with integrated access to Alitris' software for image deployment, software distribution and inventory.

In addition, HP's t5700 thin-client device will include a licensed version of Altiris' Deployment Solution software for lifecycle management.

Meanwhile, Wavelink, Kirkland, Wash., is integrating its Mobile Manager software for wireless networks with NNM and plans to unveil a beta version of the plug-in at the conference. With the plug-in, customers can manage their wireless networks through the OpenView console.