2010 Retrospective: technology trends, market changes, new products

[#1]

Happy New Year!

2010 was an exciting year for IT infrastructure management. We saw several technology trends accelerate, some new competitors enter the market, many new product releases from HP, and numerous existing customer presentations at the two Software Universe events this year. Not a bad year of innovation and growth for an industry that continues to evolve, sometimes in leaps and bounds, after two decades.

Technology Trends

Virtualization, cloud computing, and hybrid data centers continued to dominate IT discussions. Some organizations virtualized to the point of virtualization sprawl while others tried but ended up in a state of virtualization stall. Sales of HP’s Virtualization SPI continued to grow. VMworld was huge as companies tried to learn how to best manage their virtualized IT environments.

Cloud computing seems to come up in every discussion with customers. Most are slowly exploring their options, building out some private cloud offerings to complement their traditional IT infrastructure. Others, Seagate for example, are combining public cloud services with their on-premise data center. All these combinations end up creating a hybrid data center, which creates its own management challenges. My colleagues and I believe that the critical elements for monitoring hybrid services are visibility, monitoring, automation, and collaboration.

New Competitors

Cisco entered the server market and we collaborated with them so their customers can monitor their hardware using HP Operations Manager. We expect most of their hardware customers to rely on HP’s proven infrastructure monitoring software – for both servers and networks.

VMware continues to expand into mainstream IT management. Last year, the virtualization.info blog speculated on VMware’s strategy. This year VMware’s management was very clear about their intention to monitor all infrastructure during a presentation at VMworld. Do you really want another siloed management solution that does not provide full coverage for heterogeneous environments? Our latest Virtualization SPI allows customers to continue to rely on HP Operations Manager as their primary console, correlating events from the application to the virtual server to the underlying physical server. And it works on multiple hypervisors, not just VMware.

Oracle acquired Sun and is in the process of rationalizing their portfolio. I’m sure that a credible infrastructure management solution will be a part of their product offerings in the near future.

All these new players validate our belief that the market for IT infrastructure management software is growing. We welcome these new entrants and it forces everyone to raise their game and provide more value and better capabilities for our customers.

You can read about the current competitive landscape in the latest (December 2010) Gartner Magic Quadrant for Event Correlation and Analysis.

Products Releases

2010 was a huge year for the Operations Center products team. My colleagues in R&D, product management, and QA have been busy developing and releasing innovative new products along with major enhancements to our existing solutions.

On the new product side, Operations Manager i 9.0 with the new Run-Time Service Model was the big news of 2010. Part of the BSM 9 launch at Software Universe in June, the new version of OMi significantly enhances the Topology-Based Event Correlation (TBEC) capabilities to further speed time to problem resolution. The media realized the importance of this launch and wrote many articles about BSM 9 analyzing the solution and its expected impact for IT infrastructure management.

Later in the year, we released Service Health Reporter as the reporting platform for BSM 9.

We also released updates of:

• Operations Manager on Windows, Linux, and Unix.
• SiteScope
• Performance Manager
• New consolidated agent with real-time monitoring capabilities
• Virtualization SPIs
• Application SPIs

Software Universe

2010 marked the end of the line for the popular Software Universe events. Starting this year, HP Software Universe will be combined with HP Tech Forum into HP Discover.

The June event, held in Washington DC, was packed with keynotes and customer sessions that focused on BSM 9, OMi 9, and the rest of the Operations Center portfolio. Customers such as the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange presented on how HP helped them solve their complex IT management problems. Many other companies participated in the customer roundtables, in which they shared best practices with each other. You can review all the Operations Center presentations if you missed the show.

In December, Software Universe was in Barcelona. For many, this was the first time they could see live demos of BSM 9, Service Health Reporter, SiteScope and the latest versions of Operations Manager.

Personal

For me, 2010 was a very rewarding year. My colleagues and I had the opportunity to meet with dozens of customers and partners, and most of the leading industry analysts. We got to train hundreds of sales reps about all the innovations mentioned above and how to communicate the value to our customers. In addition, I met with some of the elite bloggers that cover our industry. I also received my ITIL v3 Foundation certification.

And most of all, thank you to all the dedicated readers of this blog. Your continual interest and involvement make this one of the top five blogs at HP.

What’s Next?

Most retrospectives also include a look forward. I’ll save that for a subsequent post.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.

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See the BSM9 demo. http://www.bsm9.com

Learn about the Run-time Service Model. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnmhf6Tbm60

[#2]

Is there any additional roadmap information on OM and NNMI releases?

thanks,