Unwrap the great BSM presents we have for you under the Xmas tree
Many Europeans might be familiar with Frankfurt Messe, the venue for early December’s HP Discover. What a venue, what an event! Close to 10,000 people in total attended the event across three days. Even though it’s an HP-wide event, I was surprised and delighted to see so many people around the HP Software pavilion.
We launched and demonstrated two new products—Virtualization Performance viewer (vPV) and HP Operational Analytics (OpsAnalytics) right before Discover. The atmosphere was electric in Frankfurt; sessions on HP Business Services Management were full. The main HP BSM session—that included these and other new features in the latest release HP BSM 9.20—had to be repeated; with yours truly hosting.
People came up to me at the end of both presentations and at the booths—where I couldn't get near enough to say hi to my colleagues so busy ardently animating demos—with queries on vPV and BSM. I have to admit that when I had the opportunity to visit the BSM area, the vPV, CLIP and OpsAnalytics booths were the busiest.
Following the crowds to BSM
I wonder why the popularity of the BSM area is so surprising, I mean virtualization is
still such a hot topic. It shouldn’t be shocking that freemium tools like vPV, with a simple to spot hot-spot user interface, (shown below) would attract attention. Many people ask questions like: “How many VMs do I have? Are they being used at all? Are they starved of resources and causing performance issues?” . You can find answers to these questions at vPV.
One chap who was watching over what seemed like a million shoulders, turned to me and said, “Did you guys design this? It is really cool. Does it optimize too?” Now, that’s an interesting topic. I found myself using his question and our short conversation that we had later during my BSM presentation. We are still operating in a world of recession—a do more with less world. It’s fine that you gain agility to serve the business, but surely optimization has to become a skill.
This thought is echoed by analysts, who believe that the fatboy days of datacentres are gone. IT Staff will need to get savvy at visualizing what they have, optimizing it and answering these kinds of what-if questions. I think this bodes well for our HP Service Health Reporter (SHR) and Service Health Optimizer products. If you are interested in seeing how they can help you, you can watch a video of SHO.
360degree visibility for results
I was delighted that our guest speakers enjoyed explaining how they use BSM 9.20; and in particular, the new event dashboards of HP OMI 9.21, to drive operational efficiency. Sykehuspartner of Norway showed their customized dashboards using HP OMi 9.21. Turkish Bank Kuveyt Turk showed the importance of the service models they have developed. The international banking organization’s most important business services are managed using the Run-Time Service Model that is core to HP BSM Solutions. Kuveyt Turk is seeing $400k/annum savings since using HP BSM. What if every IT team was able to gain savings like that? Talk about ROI, I was blown away by this figure!!
Another visitor watched the OpsAnalytics demos, and realized that this solution ties together event correlation with service models, to enterprise or Big Data management, using HP OMi integrated with HP Arcsight Logger. He asked why we offer a freemium version of this too. I guess people don’t expect nor associate free software and solutions with HP. I am amazed at how things are changing. I suddenly thought to myself this resonates really well with how Meg Whitman explained HP’s strategy .. vPV and OpsAnalytics play into this strategy by being:
- Agile—the customer just downloads it
- Simple - the interfaces are toy-like easy to use
- Cost effective - sure they’re free
I saw nodding heads when I introduced OpsAnalytics in the “What’s new in BSM 9.20” sessions. With all that excitement, I expect www.hp.com/go/opsanalytics to be steaming hot with traffic and downloads.
What about Predictive Analytics?
Finally, it was also interesting to meet an HP customer who added a different type of optimization solution to his bag of IT tricks. He is an early, and quite extensive, user of predictive analytics solutions—another fast growing IT management domain. What really fired my interest was when he told me he feeds business metrics into his HP Service Health Analyzer (SHA) tool. I’m a curious “Doubting Thomas”, and luckily he was willing to give me a demo from the conference connecting to his system back home. I was amazed by what I saw.
He showed me how he uses SHA, feeding it with metrics linked directly to his business revenue. For example: the number of users logged in, active user sessions vs. logins to determine a highly probable business hit. HP SHA uses predictive analytics algorithms and calculates baselines to correlate measurements of those metrics and detect anomalies, especially to gain advantage on any IT outage. His team uses a service tree that includes the same business metrics at the root, and links them to the underlying resources that impact the revenue using the same RTSM that I mentioned earlier. Clever! Have a look at the SHA video here
At this kind of event, it’s the customers that count for me. I am always fascinated what they are doing with our products and solutions. But the best part is always their smiles when they tell you how for them, HP Software Makes IT matter.
