HP introduces “Operations Manager i”

If you’ve seen a lot of news articles about HP’s IT management software this week (e.g. through Cote or Doug) it’s because the company held its Software Universe conference in Vienna this week and timed a bunch of announcements and PR events to match.

Most of the articles linked above just paraphrase the press releases and talking points. So if you’re going to get the company line, might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Which we can now do through a new HP blog about BSM. The first article was penned by Mike Shaw and that’s enough for me to want to subscribe (I worked with Mike a few times when I was at HP and he is very sharp). I think Mike also wrote the other entries but since they are not signed (and the account name, “adsey007”, is pretty opaque) I am not sure. In any case, they are pretty good. This one gives an overview of the Vienna announcements. The next one describes in more details the OMi product. I am not in position to know how well it works but, according to the article, OMi takes the important step of modeling and managing events in the context of the overall model in the CMDB. Such that the event management features (e.g. correlation) can use the already-discovered relationships between the IT elements involved in the events (e.g. dependencies). The article also implies that the CMDB has been integrated with NNM (OpenView), Service Manager (Peregrine) and Server Automation (Opsware). Which is a lot of progress in 16 months since I left HP, so I am taking it with a grain of salt (we all know there are different levels of integration). The press release says that the CMDB is now integrated with 17 HP BTO applications, so you may need a whole salt shaker. In any case it’s great to see that Ramin and team are forging ahead, delivering products and driving the integration of the BTO portfolio.

The last paragraph (“OMi actually sits on top of existing HP Operations Manager installations…”) is intriguing and may provide a clue about the depth of the integration. In any case, OMi is something to keep an eye on as it is positioned to leverage a lot of the key strengths of the HP BTO portfolio.

BTW, this OMi product has nothing to do with this OMI which was a precursor to WSMF, WSDM and WS-Management. And which most people currently working in HP Software have never heard of.