3 Steps to upgrading to BSM 9.1 – what you need to know

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Guest post by Matt Smith, BSM Global Practice Lead for HP Software Professional Services

(Matt Smith has more than 20 years of process and software solution consulting experience and has been with HP for the past 11 years. He works with HP customers to create solutions to align their IT operations across people, process and technology to meet the demands of the business.)

As cloud and mobile disrupt the technology landscape, it’s more important than ever that IT operations have visibility into the health of business services. HP Business Service Management 9.1 is a major new release of our leading business service management software. It offers a single console for monitoring cloud, virtual and mobile business services to keep your business healthy.

New in BSM 9.1 are application performance management solutions for mobile applications and services, as well as a service health analyzer that allows proactive views of configuration items across your entire infrastructure.

To make the upgrade go as smoothly as possible, HP Professional Services has created tools and processes based on years of success in helping customers through upgrades and integrations. Here are three steps you can take for a successful upgrade.

Step 1: Map out upgrade effort and benefits

It’s important in any upgrade to understand the impact and benefit of key new features. Not only does this help your organization justify the investment in the upgrade, it also ensures you get the most out of new capabilities.

To help customers assess the impact of an upgrade, HP Software Professional Services has built the Upgrade Effort Calculator. With this tool, customers can get a picture of their current state and identify features of the upgrade that will have the greatest impact on their business. Based on best practices, the calculator delivers a detailed estimate of the effort required as part of an upgrade, looking across all upgrade phases and product modules.

Step 2: Choose your upgrade path

After assessing the benefits and work required, customers should choose one of two upgrade paths, depending on the role of Business Availability Center (BAC) in their business and the extent of customization required.

• ·         Direct: This path is most suitable for businesses in which BAC is not mission-critical. If some downtime is acceptable, BAC is brought offline, then uninstalled and reinstalled on existing infrastructure. The benefits of this path are overall upgrade speed and reduced cost.

• ·         Staged: If downtime for BAC is not acceptable, HP Professional Services creates a parallel staging environment on separate infrastructure. Running production data in real time from the existing version, the staged deployment can be tested and monitored over a period of time. The benefits of this path are increased time for testing, training and customization.

Step 3: Execute for success

After upgrading, it’s important to map new capabilities to business goals and ease adoption among end users and administrators with training and mentoring.

HP Software Professional Services can help in project management, change management and defining success criteria to accelerate time to value from your HP BSM solution.

To learn more, contact HP Professional Services.

Related links:

• ·         HP Business Service Management 9.1 upgrade service
• ·         http://www.hp.com/go/bsmprofessionalservices
• ·         http://www.hp.com/go/hpexperts
• ·         HP Business Service Management software