Three can play at this game

Service management key for HP to keep up with CA, Tivoli

By Jim Duffy
Network World, 6/15/98

Seattle - Having ceded enterprise management mindshare to Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) and Tivoli Systems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is determined to become a leader in the nascent IT service-management market.

At the recent OpenView Forum International user group conference, HP emphasized that it has solid products and implementation plans for deploying IT service management. IT service management is the practice of tying IT operations and resources to business objectives.

At the conference, HP announced a variety of improvements and future enhancements to its two key OpenView service management packages - IT/ Operations, for measuring system availability, and IT/Administration, for change and configuration management (NW, June 8, page 6).

But HP executives also used the meeting to remind users that the company is firmly committed to the OpenView platform and will continue to invest in it. HP has been restating support for OpenView since last summer, when a company executive resoundingly endorsed CA's Unicenter TNG as a "preferred" enterprise manager.

"We have the commitment all the way from the top to invest and grow the OpenView business," said Olivier Helleboid, general manager of HP's OpenView software division, as he replayed 3-month-old videos of HP CEO Lew Platt affirming the company's support for OpenView and for software in general. "I think the message is pretty clear, " Helleboid said.

The message was not so clear last summer. That's when Dick Watts, an executive in HP's server division, shared a dais with CA CEO Charles Wang, and delivered a firm endorsement of Unicenter and announced an agreement to bundle it with HP servers. The deal led many industry observers to count OpenView out as a viable competitor to Unicenter and to Tivoli's TME 10 framework for enterprise management.

But enterprise management is evolving into IT service management, according to Helleboid, so HP believes CA and Tivoli will have some catching up to do.

HP by no means has the IT service-management market cornered. Tivoli is getting ready to unveil a service-management roadmap leveraging products from its acquisition of service-desk developer Software Artistry, Inc. (NW, May 11, page 1).

And CA, though not as active as HP or Tivoli in service management, has been a big proponent of business process-based management, which also attempts to tie IT operations to business goals. CA also has service-desk and help-desk products that can easily be positioned as service-management offerings.

Helleboid believes HP's biggest advantage over CA and Tivoli is that OpenView allows users to build a service-management infrastructure incrementally.

"We implement service management with a building-block approach," Helleboid said, referring to separate OpenView offerings for service definition, deployment and monitoring. CA and Tivoli offer all-encompassing enterprise-management frameworks that take months - sometimes years - to implement, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yet HP has a mindshare problem to contend with. CA and Tivoli are usually the first - and only - names that come to people's minds when the term "enterprise management" comes up.

Helleboid, however, does not see it as a two-horse race.

"We are clearly in the Big Three, and we feel very good about that," he said.