I would recommend looking at the session catalog and sign up (basically reserving a spot) for any sessions that you really want to attend. A couple of the ITSM related sessions (such as What's New with Service Manager) already have a number of people registered and could fill up.

Stuart Ranch gave a presentation in a recent  Birthright virtual summit on Practical Problem Management. You can access the recording at http://www.brighttalk.com/r/c6h

HP Discover is coming up soon - June 4-7. As opposed to the days of the Software Universe (or reaching further back to the OpenView Forum) that felt a bit like a family reunion, this pan HP event will be bigger than ever. For more info on what is going on in the ITSM world, read on ...

More and more customers are implementing Configuration Manager in order to save time on configuration audits, identify servers with nonstandard configurations, monitor undesired changes to their applications and systems, and report on configuration policy breaches.  The latest release of HP UCMDB Configuration Manager (version 9.31) aligns with these needs and focusses on improving the configuration management process and information sharing with particular attention paid to enhancing other IT management processes such as change management and incident management.

The cloud promises creation and delivery of services being as easy as never before, and businesses are moving toward multi-sourcing and a hybrid delivery model, where services and service components are built from internal and external sources to create standardized service catalogs. But this is only one face of the same coin; on the other one the cloud comes with more complexities that need to be addressed with the right IT Service Management solution. The business white paper ...

Discover the content of this new maintenance release the brings a scalable and unicode version the web client on Linux platforms...

10 screen shots with comments give a better understanding than a 40 slides presentation on the value that HP Asset Manager brings to its customers in Software Asset Management... have a look and enjoy!

The HP Universal CMDB (UCMDB) recently released the newest version of 9.05.  These exciting new updates improve a product already amongst the top of the industry.  The improvements showcase HP’s devotion to excellence and demonstrate valuable client feedback does not go unheard.  The list below breaks down just a few of the latest enhancements to this fantastic product.

What do scorecards, ITIL, performance management, and CobiT all have in common? KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.

HP's Myles Suer has written a couple of blog posts on the overall topic of IT Performance Management including one that went live today with an orientation across Operations and Infrastructure.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Discover-Performance-Blog/How-the-VP-of-IT-Ops-can-better-drive-business-relevance/ba-p/5568585

http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/mylessuer/how-vp-it-operations-can-drive-business

The next EMEA customer forum is scheduled for May 8-10 in London, UK. If I counted right, this is the 5th forum, and again a great opportunity to network and share best practices with your peers.

I know that a lot of our channel partners read this blog. I suspect that you're already heard, but just in case ...

And another plug, this time for a recent Forrester ITSM and Automation whitepaper

I got a question earlier today about where do HP ITSM thought leaders write/post (beyond this blog of course). Stuart Rance who has been one of HP's contributing authors to the ITIL books suggested the Transforming IT Blog. I just read a couple of posts there and thought that I should pass the link and suggestion along.

A related thought follows ...

Lower you time and cost for load testing!

We are very excited to share this news with you! HP’s new HP LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud OEM partner solution enables certified partners to deliver flexible performance testing on demand delivered in a short-term consumption based model via cloud.

HP LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud is Scalable & Elastic, Cloud based Service and Affordable!

The new Service Manager Collaboration capabilities that were recently announced at HP Discover in Vienna are available for download on HP LiveNetwork (https://hpln.hp.com/ or www.hp.com/go/livenetwork).

More specifically, this is under the Service Manager section. The following should take you straight there - https://hpln.hp.com/group/collaboration-content-service-manager. You likely need to log in via HP Passport to get the package.

Enjoy!

HP Discover will take place June 4-7, 2012 in Las Vegas.

The customer call for papers just went live on https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2012/events/discover/index.php or if you want to pass along something shorter www.hp.com/go/discover.

The public call for papers will be open until February 20. Sessions or case studies that discuss migration, present integrations and use cases across multiple products, illustrate use of metrics and key performance indicators, and/or had relatively quick implementation cycles are all popular topics.

ITSM and ITAM sessions highlighting Service Manager or Asset Manager will be covered as part of the Operations Management sub-track of the Software track.

Here is the age of Hybrid IT. The IT organization delivers services to its end users... using an infrastructure that can be owned by the IT, or fulfilled over the cloud. Managing IT as a P&L is the best way to prove its value to the other businesses while optimizing the costs for delivering the services.

Discover the New Cloud Billing Package that extends Asset Manager capabilities to support the IT providing internal and external services and manage users' subscriptions and related billing.

http://www.hp.com/go/xs - Silvia Prickel, Managing Director IT Business Office, United Airlines shows how the HP Software Executive Scorecard enabled her to meet IT challenges & align to the business.

The new version of Executive Scorecard is also available for mobile devices. See it in action!

www.hp.com/go/discovervienna

In case you want to follow some of the highlights

With HP Discover now only a few days away, the product management team is looking forward to in-person conversations with attendees. This is where we learn the key ways IT organizations are leveraging the products we deliver, often in ways that reap even more value than we may have originally realized.

One customer experience comes to mind where members of our team visited a healthcare service organization to help them get started with HP UCMDB Configuration Manager (UCMDB-CM)....

HP Discover is only about a week ago and I am really excited. When I was building my schedule today using the website's scheduler I thought: Why not share some details of the HP ITSM related activities at HP Discover? So here you go ...

On Wednesday, November 9 Vivit hosted a one hour webinar yesterday discussing CPS Energy from San Antonio moving from Service Manager 7.11 to 9.30. The replay is now live and available for viewing. You do have to be a Vivit member to access the recording, but all regular readers of this blog should be members!!! There is no cost to be an associate member which grants you access to lots of materials including webinars and recordings like this one.

Vivit archived webinar page

Customer Success Story: Upgrade to Service Mgr 9.3

See how the HP IT Executive Scorecard goes beyond cross-portfolio reporting to provide real-time management of IT with a business perspective using included KPIs and objectives.

Executive Scorecard

Join HP and Avnet on Thursday, Nov. 3rd at 2:00 pm EST and hear from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida how they addressed their discovery challenges with DDMA, the lessons they've learned and pitfalls you can avoid on your CMS journey.

Click on this link to register for the webcast:  http://resources.cio.com/ccd/assets/15495/detail

Yep, I found the problem.  There seems to be an intrinsic temporal dimension to ITSM implementations that I think needs to be called out.  A reference implementation of even a rudimentary ITSM "out of the box" will be different depending on what you start with and the order in which you implement your use cases. Meaning, if you implement Asset  then Change then Configuration Management, your resulting CMS will work differently than if you changed the order of just these three around!  ITSM math is apparently non-commutative!  I personally find this hilarious.

Is it a good or bad starting point to implement IT Service Management out-of-the-box? This is a good question and was the title of an interactive roundtable hosted by the Vivit HP Service Manager Special Interest Group and a customer at the HP EMEA ITSM Customer Forum in Berlin. Let me share a summary and some observations from this roundtable ...

Straight from a recent blog post by Forrester's Stephen Mann (and more below)

To achieve this, we have created an ITSM Practitioner Health Check in conjunction with the itSMF UK. It is deliberately not called a “survey” and requires minimal effort to complete. Depending on how long you want or need to think about your responses it should take just a few minutes.

Please take the Health Check here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ITSMPractitionerhealthcheck

HP is rated as Positive in the Gartner 2011 MarketScope for the IT Asset Management Repository that just released last week. Click if you'd like to read or download the MarketScope report.

In honor of Jody's recent ITSM parenting post featuring a picture from one of my favorite movies, the Service Manager team will some be releasing a new set of change management best practices via HP Live Network.

These will be based on the new HP Service Manager "Process Designer". To provide an overview of these new capabilities, we're having a webinar on October 27 at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern titled "Take change management to the next level".

Continue on to read more ...