HP, IBM Duel on Management Software

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Management software is a multi-billion-dollar market that shows no signs of slowing down.

HP and IBM made sure of that by trotting out new software products to help customers get a better grip on the flow of their data.

At HP’s Software Universe conference in Nice, France, HP unleashed new IT service management software in its ongoing fight to win market share from IBM, CA and BMC Software in this space.

The OpenView Dashboard 1.0 pulls information from multiple data sources to help customers monitor their enterprise applications and e-mail in real-time.

Customers can build detailed dashboard views of business services through a point-and-click interface that will inform them of system events, performance, and anti-virus security attacks.

Bill Emmett, chief solutions manager at HP’s management software, said that while dashboards are nothing new in management software, HP believes its approach saves more time. While traditional dashboards have created a single snapshot or view, Emmett said OpenView Dashboard allows customers to create multiple views in less than an hour.

Starting at $60,000, OpenView Dashboard 1.0 will be ready in the first quarter of 2006.

OpenView Service Desk 5.0 is a configuration management database that boasts out-of-the-box integrations for closed-loop operations and reduced costs, including a new reporting tool and a “Webstart” tool for speedy deployment.

Service Desk 5.0 links with OpenView Dashboard to help customers get an automated response to business information related to incidents and changes on a network. It also works with OpenView Configuration Management and OpenView Service Desk Process Insight.

Available now, Service Desk 5.0 pricing varies according to service level agreements.

Available in Q1 2006, OpenView Business Process Insight 2.0 monitors and reports on business processes. Version 2.0 includes pre-defined business metrics and automatic process health dashboards.

HP’s upgrade come as part of CEO Mark Hurd’s directive to grow the OpenView line through internal development and acquisition.

While the latest OpenView product are homegrown, HP has made several management-oriented purchases of late, including AppIQ, Peregrine Systems, and a bid last week for Trustgenix.

Not to be outdone, IBM also updated its Tivoli management software portfolio, adding new autonomic software products that can pinpoint and fix problems before they stifle a Web-based business.

Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 allows companies to manage online applications, such as e-mail or bill paying systems, by correcting IT service problems that can gum up a company’s servers, operating systems and databases before it impacts customers.

Tivoli Composite Application Manager accelerates access to information on the Internet by predicting and fixing bottlenecks that crop up as dozens of different systems connect under a service oriented architecture (SOA) (define).

Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms gauges the status of applications running on multiple platforms and operating systems and uses policies to bring them back online if the system fails.

This article was first published on Earthweb.com.