HP Helps Enterprises Accelerate Delivery of IT Projects with New Software, Services

HP today announced a significant expansion of its Business Technology Optimization (BTO) capabilities to help IT organizations improve efficiencies and deliver better business outcomes.

With major software updates and new services in its quality management and service management offerings, as well as further integration across its software product line, HP is enabling customers to rapidly deliver IT projects and services to achieve on-time, on-budget product introductions and increased profitability.

The expanded portfolio was unveiled at HP Software Universe, the company’s annual customer event focused on its software business and related partners and resellers.

“With so much of business today relying on technology, CEOs need IT more than ever to fuel growth,” said Thomas E. Hogan, senior vice president, Software, HP. “To help IT deliver the speed and agility the business needs, HP BTO software and services provide a platform to align with business requirements, automate for efficiency and increase collaboration across functions.”

According to a recently released study conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of HP, companies are experiencing unacceptable levels of IT delays. Although 62 percent of companies surveyed said that faster IT meant higher profits, the study showed that one in four IT projects are delivered late. Furthermore, majority of those surveyed said no more than one in two IT initiatives produced positive business outcomes.

This gap results from tight budgets and limitations imposed by manual processes, point solutions and teams working in silos. To address this growing gap, the HP BTO portfolio helps IT organizations:

• Make sure IT and non-IT managers work on the same business goals;


• Speed up internal processes within IT functions such as IT strategy, applications and IT operations; and


• Automate processes across the different IT roles.

“As one of the world’s largest hotel and leisure companies, we are constantly identifying opportunities to grow our business online,” said Todd Thompson, chief information officer, Starwood Hotels & Resorts. “By giving us the ability to rapidly update our business applications without compromising quality, HP Software helps us improve the customer experience and increase the loyalty of the hundreds of thousands of guests, business customers and travel agents that use our reservation system every day.”

Quality Management solutions

Updates to HP Quality Center software and HP LoadRunner software as well as new quality management services include:

• HP Quality Center Software – Includes the first ever business requirements and quality management capabilities fully integrated in a single real-time system. This major new release enables customers to adopt “agile testing” methods to facilitate more frequent software releases while taking a risk-based, business priority-driven view of quality management.


• HP LoadRunner Software – Enhancements help address the major shift in the way IT will deliver applications over the Internet, including advanced performance testing of Web 2.0-enabled service-oriented architectures and rich Internet applications.


• HP Quality Management Ecosystem – Provides customers with the broadest support for platforms, applications and environments by allowing HP Software partners to develop and market test accelerators for HP Quality Center and HP LoadRunner software.


• HP Quality Factory Services – Part of the HP Services Application Lifecycle Optimization offering, this set of best practices and services helps IT organizations successfully implement improved application quality and performance, process.

“Demand for greater business agility is driving the majority of new application implementations and changes, and it requires the optimization of every aspect of the application’s lifecycle,” said Thomas Murphy, research director, Gartner, an industry analyst firm. “When it comes to delivering applications that meet the needs of the business, quality assurance teams must look for ways to greatly accelerate their testing cycles in order to meet increasingly stringent schedules from business and application teams.”

Service Management solutions

Enhancements to HP Service Management portfolio include innovations in HP Change and Configuration Management Center, HP Service Management Center software solutions, and new related services. The offerings include:

• HP Change Control Management Software – Helps IT organizations accelerate the delivery of change by automating approval processes and eliminating the need for time-consuming change advisory board meetings. This new software release is part of HP Software’s end-to-end change control solution.


• HP Configuration Management Software – Helps reduce the risk of business disruptions by allowing customers to automatically and reliably deploy new applications and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows Vista™ to the entire enterprise.


• HP Best Practices for Service Center – Provides pre-defined ITIL processes for service management that helps IT organizations accelerate HP Service Center deployment and optimize its ongoing use.


• HP Service Management Framework – This new services offering, which is a consolidation of HP’s solutions, expertise, methodologies and industry standards, including ITIL v3 and COBIT, help IT partner with the businesses it supports, by providing better governance, service management and efficiency.

“At Northwest Airlines we are able to provide efficient and reliable software services throughout our enterprise, in turn reducing our costs of doing business,” said Ken Gleason, manager client products, Northwest Airlines, Inc. “HP Configuration Management solutions have helped us successfully manage change across business-critical applications, including those used at every airport we service worldwide. We’re confident that HP solutions will help us reduce business risk, as we migrate our enterprise to Microsoft Windows Vista.”

Additional technology integration

Building on more than 75 integration points across its BTO portfolio, HP unveiled new cross-product integrations that help customers automate key processes across IT silos with a lifecycle approach, including:

• HP Universal CMDB – The only configuration management database (CMDB) built on dependency mapping and integrated with help desk, change and configuration management and business service management offerings. This helps reduce the risk of business disruptions by ensuring a consistent definition of a business service from the time it is ordered from the service catalog, through change impact analysis and approval, to the time it is deployed and monitored in production; and


• HP Service Center Software – Several new integrations help to better align the change request, approval and deployment processes and accelerate delivery of IT services to business users. For instance, HP Change Control Management and HP Configuration Management are integrated with HP Service Center to create a closed-loop change process and complete audit trail for compliance purposes.

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $97.1 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com



(1) The Economist Intelligence Unit whitepaper, “Technology at the Speed of Business,” is available for download at EIU Report.