A guest post from Will Gillen, a SiteScope user with about 10 years of experience with the product. He currently manages over 10,000 servers, 16,000 URLs and about 200,000 total monitors. 

One attraction for customers that attend HP Discover is the opportunity to schedule individual meetings with product experts. These meetings tend to be open and honest discussions about where customers want to go with their infrastructure or business service monitoring and how HP can help them on that journey. The latter is where we have a great advantage in the market with our innovative and integrated business service management solutions.

A guest post from Judy DePuy, who is one of the people at HP who helps manage partner relationships.

- Peter

I just attended a fabulous get-together at the V Bar at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, where we are holding HP Discover this year. The hosts of the event were CT Consultants, one of our Canadian Partners, and Arrow, one of HP’s leading distributors.

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.

While the main stage presentations on Monday focused on high-level strategy, Tuesday’s keynotes were more tactical, showcasing innovations across the hardware and software portfolio. The thing that came together for me and many others I spoke to was how complementary the hardware and software presentations were. Both focused on solving one of the big challenges customers face today: how to deliver new business services more efficiently.

The IT Performance Suite (ITPS) was a common topic of conversation among customers, partners, and peers during the week. Most of my discussions focused on how ITPS used metrics collected by the products in the Operations Center portfolio, such as Operations Manager, SiteScope, Performance Manager, and our Smart Plug-Ins. The short answer is that the Operations Center metrics rolls up and ITPS combines it with other metrics from other parts of the portfolio to provide executives with a complete picture of how their business is running.

I arrived a day early to HP Discover (Sunday rather than Monday) to participate in our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings. For those of you not familiar with the role of the Customer Advisory Board, it is to solicit input from a select group of power users of our products. This CAB focused on users of our Business Service Management (BSM) solutions, which include Operations Center, Business Availability Center, and Network Management Center.

We will have many opportunities to learn about Service Intelligence at HP Discover. You can attend sessions, see demos on the show floor, or schedule meetings with experts to discuss your specific neeeds.

At HP Discover, Ryan Granard, Director IT Infrastructure at DreamWorks Animation, and I will deliver session 4562 on Friday June 10 at 11:00AM.

DreamWorks takes virtualization to the next level:
Best practices for building and managing a private cloud

You will learn how they harnessed 55 million render hours to create the visual magic behind Kung Fu Panda 2 and their other hit films.

If you are attending HP Discover, make sure to have your sales rep take you into the Innovation Zone. We will be showing an exciting new product that ...

For those people that are unable to make it to Las Vegas, we are excited to offer a web-only software event on June 7 and June 8. Each day we will host 2 hours of exclusive media coverage, which will include General Session keynote presentations, customer and executive interviews, and live commentary. Customers, partners and employees are all invited to attend this free event. Register now at www.hp.com/go/discoverbackstagepass. To view the agenda, click here.

HP Discover is less than two weeks away. In lieu of a single “tips and tricks” session on HP Operations Manager, we are having a full-day technical session on Wednesday June 8, 2011 where you can meet experts from HP and share your experiences with your peers. This day-long event of technical forums adds a face-to-face setting to the online practitioner series hosted by Lindsay Parker.

Don't miss these live forums at HP Discover where you will have the opportunity to learn tips and tricks, best practices, and innovative ways to use HP software - from like-minded individuals like yourself!