HP Unifies IT Services Management

According to Paul Muller, vice president of strategic marketing for software products, HP has spent millions of dollars integrating IT systems and application management to create a unified approach around a new run-time framework that allows IT organizations to track and manage IT services in real time.

The system, says Muller, is designed to allow any given IT administrator to manage any specific storage, server or network component, while allowing senior managers to monitor delivery of specific IT services that rely on those components. This means that for the first time, said Muller, IT organizations don’t have to acquire a multitude of different tools to tactically and strategically manage IT.

Muller said IT management challenges have been especially exacerbated by the advent of virtualization, which in many cases not only masked underlying technologies from existing systems management tools, but also required specialized tools of their own to manage.

In addition to launching BSM 9.0, HP also unveiled today a new test data management tool that allows IT organizations to test applications using live data in real time, which Muller said will automate one of the more tedious tasks associated with testing enterprise applications.

With the release of BSM 9.0, HP is seeking to provide one integrated pane of glass for managing all the different aspects of enterprise IT, said Muller.