HPSU 2009 - Part 2

I helped set up the Vivit booth with other local chapter leaders and the board of directors, grabbed a really quick (but heavy!) breakfast, then squeezed into the mainstage room for the keynote presentations.

They kicked things off with some brilliant animated clips outlining the current challenges faced by IT - including IT business alignment, the current "new" economy, virtualisation, and cloud computing amongst other things.

Jake Johanssen was our host for the morning. A stand-up comedian which is a really different take but made things much more entertaining than they've been before at 08:00 on a Tuesday morning. The typical jabs at Canadians were made, but Jake threw in some other topical humour that was quite engaging. He really got the crowd warmed up well. The room was definitely smaller than previous years, but it was filled. We're waiting to hear attendance numbers overall. Some interesting trivia about the impact of the economy is that 27% of conferences in Vegas were cancelled this year.

Andy Isherwood VP & GM of HP Software Services
Andy started off thanking for people to come given the economic restraints - a message that brings home where things are at globally an across the US. His discourse started with a focus on budgets being cut between 0 - 40%, and a lot of uncertainty in HP's customers. Andy asked the audience to consider the situation as an opportunity to be innovative. The HP opinion is to try and get ahead of the economic recovery curve by aligning with business, reducing costs, consolidation, and increased efficiency.
Three examples were provided of 3 organisations that have achieved a quick ROI:

• JetBlue

73% decrease in testing costs, 80% reduction in post production failures, 3x increase in testing efficiency, 70% increase in test virtualisation.

• Altec

10% app downtime reduction, 20% faster response time, 15% increase in customer satisfaction

• T-Mobile (US-Washington)

Significant cost savings through efficiency improvements, 50% decrease in ERP group testting time, 75% reduction in ERP port-prod defects, greater application availability.

These three are the winners of the HP Software Solutions 2009 awards of excellence

It's always nice to hear that organisations have done wonderful things, but the key question is always "So where do you start?"
HP's keynote answer to this was:

• Operational focus to provide a transformational focus over time.
• Cost optimisation to move capital to fund innovation initiatives
• Focus on execution of automation, financial management, virtualisation, and consolidation.

This is to me really just new wrappings and graphics on an existing message. I have to wonder why we need to keep making this message heard - is it just not getting through to IT leaders or are those leaders hearing and getting the message, but unable to execute because of other factors - economy, difficulty in showing ROI, ? Sounds like this area needs exploring - future topic?

Andy followed up with the HP message that they are about solutions, not products. The delivery options they are flogging are in-house, EDS, Cloud Services SaaS, and HP Partners (oh yeah, them.) I'm still waiting to hear something positive about the EDS acquisition from a customer perspective - I'll be visiting their booth on the showfloor later today to see what I can learn.

Andy touched on what's new in the IT services offering from HP, which is "Cloud Assure", IT financial management, IT performance analytics, and IT resource optimisation.

The marketing branding from HP has changed this year to a new four words; Optimise (technology portfolio - IT Mgt Software), Leverage (biz info), Elevate (biz performance), and Improve (customer experience).

Andy discussed about HP support, and claimed that customer satisfaction is at an all-time high based on improvements made over the last two years. A big piece apparently was "in-sourcing" aspects of the HP support organisations - interesting. He did claim that he was under no illusions that things were ideal. He also commented that things need improvement with customers getting stuck at L1 when things don't get escalated timely, and at L3 when software changes that need to be made aren't happening fast enough.

The services organisation was discussed and that it has been tightly embedded into HP Software overall and is using optmisations like knowledge management to increase IP. Andy also noted that he feels this is not in conflict with the partner environment, but I think this statement is at odds with what is actually happening (actions speak louder than words) in particular the changes that have been made to partner status making it basically impossible for independent and small consulting organisations to have partner status (and benefits) with HP.

Andy closed by thanking the audience for their trust & confidence in HP, our time invested here at the show, and enforced his message that HP is proud to be a customers partner, ready to listen and act with the customers to see success for everyone.


Betty Smith VP of Process at John Hancock & President Emeritus with Vivit
Betty started with a discussion about the first HP software (Mercury) project around TestDirector to improve defect management on their internal web site and replacing spreadsheets and access databases with a centralised tool. They then migrated TestDirector to other software bases in a 6 week period once the initial pilot project had completed. SOme impressive numbers to be sure.

Betty discussed the complexities of the John Hancock/Manulife Financial organisation and the desire to drive efficency and competitive advantage.

She highlighted three main points of how this is done:

• Establish point solutions that provide value - JH does not support long implementations - any job must be finished between 2-6 months.
• Extend the solution to other areas - cross the silos & work across the organisation
• Create the longer term vision and focus on a match between IT & business goals. This provides JH an end state that is adaptable but stable, and leads to lifecycle management.

Products suites in particular that JH has implemented include Quality Management, Asset Management - (DDM, uCMDB). Betty claimed an increased efficiency for chargebacks from 3 weeks to one day using these new systems & processes. Performance Centre, and Business Availability Centre were also discussed, both of these are based out of centralised teams that work across all silos to support the business units.

Further, the discussion touched on Service Catalogue and Service manager being centralised and underpinned by uCMDB.
PPM started off as point solutions within numerous business units, but information wasn't being shared well. The PPM project consolidated and eliminated various applications to standardise on a single platform. Another key advantage of the project was that it defined centralised PM practices and processes.

Betty's main claim was that she works off of a simple end-state vision which she shared grahically with the audience. It had some interesting approaches illustrated in the diagram.

Betty discussed techniques that JH used to increase awareness and support including "show & tell" monthly meetings of internal SIGs cross-organisation, developed user forums in sharepoint, and allow for the solutions to be showcased. JH puts on monthly roadshows for the senior mgt level to validate direction and what si importnat to each of the BUs, allow an oppoortunity to adjust priorities, and these are run with individiaul biz units to really understand what is driving them and what areas they can help them improve in.

Betty discussed the regulatory requirements of a financial organisation and the abilities her successful projects have given to free up resources previously committed to audit compliance work - also this allows JH to demonstrate governance of off-shore vendors by having everyone use a centralised consistent solution. Engagement of governing bodies around risk management & expense management is another example of working across biz units. By engaging them in the use of the tools they contribute to the setting of policies and drive the use of the tools as a standard for the organisation.

Betty cited that process is over 50% of a project implementation; making the point that technology doesn't stand on its own without solid process that's oriented to your biz units & directions.

Betty summarised by emphasing that success is achieved by building incrementally focussing on low hanging fruit and creating an end-state vision.

HPSU 2009 Part 1

We spent the past two days (Saturday & Sunday) in my first Vivit Board of Directors meetings. Wow; marathon meetings! But productive. I can't spill the beans quite yet but there's a lot of changes coming fast to the members of the Vivit users group, and lots of positive things for the user community.

I'm just about to run out for dinner, but the post will start fast and furious tomorrow as I attend the keynote sessions with my laptop charged up & online! I look forward to bringing the followers of my blog the latest & greatest near real-time from the keynote presentation, breakout sessions, and tradeshow floor. This year those blog posts will be supported with podcasts as well.

Have a great evening, and blog you tomorrow!

HP Software OMW vs. OMi

Yesterday I was in attendance at a presentation by HP Software gurus and one of the topics was HP Software Operations Manager. One of the items I found a little confusing at first, and thought I'd share with the online community was the idea of OMW versus OMi. Currently, most of the install base of the Operations Manager product from HP software is one of the following:

"old naming conventions" old products (still supported, but not sold)
HP OpenView Operations for Windows 7.5x (OVOW)

"new naming conventions" current products
HP Software Operations Manager for Windows 8.x
HP Software Operations Manager i 8.x

(note that I'm just focussing on the Windows platform for the moment)

As it turns out, OMW & OMi are differing products, primarily in the interface. Keeping in mind that OMW (& OMi) architecturually are split into three peices - agentry, server, and console. OMi uses the same agentry & server components, but layers a new console on these.

Confused yet? :-)

OMW is currently at release 8.10 and will continue with future releases for now (next expected later this year to be 8.15) as fixes/improvements are added to the product. OMi is being developed in parallel, and is an upgrade (free for current OMW support contract holders) to OMW 8.10. Once you've "migrated" to OMi you stay on that platform. HP is not "pushing" customers to OMi at this time, so if you've got OMW running well, and don't see an immediate need for OMi features (to be discussed in my next posting) then don't rush out the door, but start your research.

Please feel free to ask for any further clarification that I can add to my next postings!

Updated Fognet Field Guide to NNM Available

Fognet's Field Guide to OpenView Network Node Manager

A reference guide for administrators of HP Software Network Node Manager.

This vade mecum is written for field consultants, users and administrators of the HP Network Node Manager (NNM) software product. The second edition covers information that is relevant for NNM product versions 6.0 through 7.53. It does not cover NNM 8i, which is an entirely new and different product. It was written for those who seek a shortcut to commonly used product info that is either missing or obfuscated in the product docs, and it covers practical implementation information that can’t be found in any product documentation or the fine product manual or reference pages. This guide was gleaned from OpenView users and from the author’s fifteen years of compiled notes on the product.

June 2008 Update: 2nd Edition now available in paperback via Lulu or Amazon or PDF download via Lulu

HP OM8 for Windows - First Review

While at PEG March '08 I've been attending the Operations Manager Windows 8/SiteScope training. I've had the web-delivered "intro to" session a couple of months ago, but there's nothing like the hands-on with the HP experts there to walk you through and answer questions.

Prior to this week, I knew at a high-level what most of the new features/functions to the Windows version of the product would be. A lot of the functionality that was previously only available with the Unix version has been ported. I also knew about Reporter, the HTTPS agents, and Performance being packaged up together in OMW8.

My initial thoughts after three days of instructor-led hands-on is that there are enough significant improvements here for any OVOW 7.x users to start planning their upgrade. And anyone who is going down the path of trying to find an ESM solution should give this product a fair shake in their evaluations.

Nodes Business Like ESM Business
Having the External Nodes feature available for the Windows platform is great. You can use the standard pattern matching syntax for OM to match messages from nodes not in DNS against "catch-all" groups and this is helpful as many organizations don't seem to have their DNS 100% clean... But besides processing messages, the ability (which has been there previously) to have nodes without agents in the node & service topology is quite handy. HP has put a new wrapper around the node config editor which is useful since the addition of the HTTPS agent type makes node config a little trickier than it used to be. However, you can always jump to "expert mode" and do things the "old" way. Obviously, the inclusion of the HTTPS agents is a huge leap forwards for the Windows management world, but beware - it's not just a single port each way to manage through the firewall. Another really nice touch is the ability to push HTTPS agents to UNIX nodes. This function is technically unsupported, but easy and useful.

Service Please!
Version 8 also brings the CLI access to the configuration of service via the service API.

Config This
For anyone who's rolled up their sleeves and dug into the OVOW registry previously, you'll be glad to hear about the Server Configuration editor in OMW8. Many of the settings and configuration that were largely unknown and only available through registry edits are now contained in this powerful GUI. Config items from auditing to database to agent certificates are accessed through this interface. Another long-awaiting config item is the ability to add AD groups to roles in the User Role Config Editor.

Other useful features include the unplanned/scheduled outages, remote action security, and detailed heart-beat polling config options.

All-in-all, if you're an OVOW shop today, start talking to your consultants about the upgrade (it's going to take some planning!) and if you're not using a tool like this yet, check it out. Pricing is still going to be the major issue for anyone new to this market space, and I'm waiting to hear from HP if they'll be offering an "Express" package like they did for OVOW 7.5x to make it more affordable to the mid-tier market.

HP Software Partner Enablement Galaxy

Another week on the road, after spending some "quality" time in New Orleans at HP Software Partner Enablement Galaxy last week I've come away with a few thoughts to share here. It's good to have a little time to reflect on it since I've been on the road most of October and my thoughts were largely focused on just getting back home.

To give a little background, HP Software PEG was a "by invitation" event where just over 100 consultants who are HP Software partners gathered to learn more about the current state of HP Enterprise Systems Management Software, and get some specific skills ramp-up on one of five product sets of which advanced & condensed "boot camp" style training was being offered.

Partners in attendance were from "the Americas" but primarily from the US. I met about 8 other Canadians, and a small handful of folks from Central/South America.

So, now to the meat of my thoughts... After the first day I was worried this was going to be more sales oriented than technical training. The first half of the day was spent with some "rah rah" speeches about selling software and the HP Software roadmap in very general terms in a general session. After the morning's session, we broke into our various classrooms. Personally, I choose to take the Business Availability Centre basic/intermediate level training. Again, the second half of day one ended up being an overview of the various components that make up the HP "BAC" suite, and some fairly high-level information. We each were given an HP laptop to work off of for the week, pre-set with VMWare Player and a couple of VMs. As the week progressed we got way more hands on and the teacher/subject matter became more interesting and challenging. The real challenge, however, was practical hands-on learning.

As it turns out, BAC depends on 3 core servers (Gateway, Data Processing, DB) which can run on two separate servers, but are reasonably resource intensive. The once we got to distributing the probes for various types of data gathering and synthetic transactions, we ran into some serious configuration and performance problems running those on the VMs on the laptops. That really slowed the learning curve.

Also, there were no formal printed course materials for us to take. After complaining about this at the end of day one, we were quickly provided the following morning with hardcopies of the various Power-Point slide decks, but without any accompanying notes other than those we'd take ourselves. So, to walk away from the bootcamp without demo or eval software or course materials has made it a big challenge to try and keep up the learning curve since I've returned to the office. Plus, trying to knowledge share to other folks on my team is also a challenge.

I'm planning on summarizing some high-level info on BAC for a presentation at my local Vivit chapter this Friday, but beyond that it's getting to be a bit of a challenge to leverage the week of heads-down learning into expanded corporate skill sets.

The technical challenges with the laptop based VMs I suggested at the time could be dealt with by having HP actually ship a rack of 1U servers for each classroom, and have the class break into small groups who work together implementing a BAC solution. Add to that some sort of training materials and demo software we can take with us back to our offices and then we've got a great solution.

So, was the week in New Orleans worth my time? This time I'd say yes. But if I go again in Feb where-ever they are planning on hosting the sessions, I'm hoping that they address some of the issues myself and fellow students flagged in the course reviews to ensure that we can have more productivity during and after the classes.

New Software from HP, New Orleans from Jason

I won't even try and affect a cajun accent for this post, but here I am on my last day in New Orleans, at the HP Partner Galaxy event. I just spent five days heads down and in high-gear learning mode absorbing everything I can about the new release of HP's Business Availability Centre and learning about the other new product releases out this month.

I'm pretty well rounded on HP's previous offering in this area, OVIS (OpenView Internet Services) but now that all changes up with the Mercury acquisition of last year. Now they've got a really interesting package to handle complete business end-user experience monitoring and management.

The toolset is complex to get your head around initially, but the good news is that it comes in components and you only need to buy & install what you need. What you will need though, if you don't have someone on staff to handle ESM applications, is consulting time to get this done right the first time.

I'll post again soon with more details and opinions, right now I've got to catch my flights back to LAX, and then Vancouver!

Happy ESMing everyone, and so long to New Orleans.