HP Discover: Customer Roundtables Summary - Day 3

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One of my favorite parts of HP Discover is hosting the Customer Roundtable discussions. For those of you who have not participated in these sessions, it is when a group of customers get together with some HP experts (typically from Product Management, Technical Marketing, R&D, and/or Product Marketing) and have a discussion. What I like best about the customer roundtables is that they are completely unstructured; every discussion is different, based on the composition of participants.

This year, I got to facilitate two roundtable discussions. In each one, we had about 8 or 9 customers with 3 or 4 HP staff. Most of the people in the room were practitioners, which means they have hands-on experience with our products and specific questions they wanted to hear answered. Ground rules: share your knowledge, listen to others, any topic is fair game.

Imagine a small room with a long rectangular table. There is a single white board on the side. Every seat is filled. This is the starting point.

I typically begin my sessions by having everyone introduce themselves - name, company, job responsibilities, what HP products you own, and what you want to learn from the session. In both cases, the participants owned most of the HP Software portfolio. Operations Manager and SiteScope were most common, but our list also included UCMDB, DDMA, Server Automation, Operations Orchestration, most of the Business Availability Center products, Network Node Manager, Service Manager, and a wide variety of third party products. Once we got past this common foundation, the two sessions diverged.

In the first roundtable, the focus on was on OMi and the best way to get to BSM 9. Several customers had already started on the journey; they eagerly shared their success and gave suggestions for setting up the Run-time Service Model. Our experts filled in the gaps with tips from their experience deploying Operations Manager i (OMi) in dozens of accounts.

In the second, we concentrated on integrations. Integrations between Operations Manager and Service Manager, SiteScope and Business Availability Center, Operations Manager and Operations Orchestration. Pretty much any permutation you can think of, that’s what the customers wanted to talk about so we did. For each scenario, there were people who had already done this, so there was rich, open discussion and information sharing. Again, our technical experts and evangelists imparted their wisdom. There was also some discussion about BSM 9 and the best way to get there.

For those of you who did not get to participate in these rich discussions, you have another chance. Every other week, we have an online version of the customer roundtable. We call these the “practitioner’s forum.” You can read my blog on the practitioner’s forum from a few weeks ago; it includes registration instructions.

For HP Operations Center, Peter Spielvogel.