HP Teams With Voyence On New OpenView Offering

Set for availability Aug. 1, the new OpenView product is an HP-branded version of VoyenceControl NG, which maps enterprise networks and can report and roll back changes, said Jeff Scheaffer, senior product manager for the network management business at HP, Palo Alto, Calif.

HP OpenView Network Configuration Manager "gives you a complete history of who is accessing devices [and] the configuration of those devices," Scheaffer said. "And then it takes those changes, events, configurations, operating system settings and firmware data and incorporates all of it into root-cause analysis," he said.

The deal will put to the test the ability of Voyence to protect its small group of partners from losing deals to HP once OpenView resellers get their hands on the rebranded Voyence product, said Mitch Miller, director of channels at Voyence, Richardson, Texas.

In the coming weeks, Voyence will host what Miller called "channel-sensitivity training" for its dozen or so salespeople. The effort will be to make sure Voyence's legacy partners don't lose accounts they have landed to HP partners who may bid against them with the HP-branded version of the Voyence product, Miller said.

Most Voyence resellers are already OpenView partners, and those who aren't should consider joining in order to deliver a more complete solution, said Darren Orzechowski, vice president of marketing at Voyence. However, Henry Draughon, business development manager at Florance and Associates Consulting, a Voyence partner also based in Richardson, said he has no intention of becoming an OpenView partner.

"I've still got a few reservations about the whole deal," Draughon said.

HP OpenView Network Configuration Manager is HP's answer to recent, similar change and configuration product announcements from BMC Software and IBM, Scheaffer said.

In May, IBM pegged a June 30 arrival date to its much awaited Tivoli Change and Configuration Management software.

That same month, BMC announced upgrades that simplified its Atrium Configuration Management Database product.

HP OpenView Network Configuration Manager will be sold on a per-node pricing model and should cost in the range of $20,000 to $30,000 for a typical enterprise deployment, Scheaffer said.

A partner certification and training course for the product is being developed, he said.